Mongolian Verb Voices: Causative, Passive, Cooperative

Where the voice suffixes sit

A Mongolian verb has a fixed architecture. At the front is the stem, which you get by taking –х off the dictionary form. At the back is the ending that makes the verb finite, or turns it into a participle, or hangs it onto the next clause. In between there is a slot, and what goes into that slot changes what the verb means rather than when it happened:

stem + voice + ending

The method's table of verb forms lists five suffixes for that slot: the causative –уул– and –үүл–, the passive –гд–, the cooperative –лц–, the collective –цгаа–, and the intensive –чих–, which shares the slot without being a voice. All five are printed with a hyphen on both sides, and the hyphen on the right is the whole point: these suffixes are not endings. They never close a word. Something always has to follow them.

Here is the architecture in a word the method itself takes apart:

• явуулсан
• яв– (stem) + –уул– (CAUS) + –сан (PAST)
• "had (something) sent"

Three pieces, in that order; no other order is possible. Put the ending before the voice suffix and you have not made an odd sentence but a word that is not Mongolian.

Why this page has to exist

Elsewhere in this guide you are taught to read a long Mongolian word by finding the stem at the front and peeling suffixes off the back. That method is sound, and it fails completely on a verb with a voice suffix in it. Peel the ending off туслуулсан and you are left with туслуул–, which is in no dictionary; the verb you actually need is туслах (to help), and it is hiding two syllables away behind a suffix nobody has told you about.

So a reader who has been given the peeling method and not this page gets stuck on perfectly ordinary sentences and concludes that the method was wrong. It was not wrong; it was incomplete. The slot described here is the missing step. The peeling method itself is set out in How a Mongolian Word Is Built: Stem Plus Suffixes, and the order in which everything stacks is in In What Order Suffixes Stack on a Mongolian Word.

There is a second reason, and it is about English. English has no suffixes for any of this: it brings in a second verb — make him work, have it repaired — or be plus a participle, it was built. Both are changes to the sentence. So an English speaker goes looking for a Mongolian sentence pattern, and there is none to find: Mongolian did the work inside the word, and the sentence looks entirely ordinary.

The causative: –уул– and –үүл–

The causative says that the subject does not do the action but brings it about: causes, makes, has, lets or gets someone else to do it. There are two harmonic shapes, –уул– after back-vowel stems and –үүл– after front-vowel stems.

Look at the second row closely, because it says what a causative really is. "To show" is not a separate idea from "to see" — it is causing to see. English hides that behind a different word; Mongolian puts it on the surface. The same relation runs through English pairs that look unrelated: show and see, inform and know, send and go, feed and eat. In Mongolian each pair is one verb with a suffix inside it.

Three of the four appear in the method's own sentences:

• Би Дэлгэрмаагаар захиа явуулсан. "I had a letter sent by Delgermaa."
• Та хэнээр туслуулсан бэ? "Who did you get to help you?"
• Та нар надад барилдаж үзүүлээч тэ(гэ)х үү? "Could you show me some wrestling?"

Now look at what follows the voice suffix in those three: –сан, –сан, –ээч — a past twice over, then a spoken request — while мэдүүлэх carries the dictionary –х. A causative stem is a new verb with a full set of forms, not a special form that can do one thing only.

One warning, about spelling rather than grammar: a short vowel in the stem often drops when the suffix goes on. Туслах shows the stem тусал– in тусалж but gives туслуулсан. That adjustment is not a fact about voice; it belongs to How a Mongolian Word Is Built: Stem Plus Suffixes.

Who gets made to do it

A causative sentence has one participant more than its plain version: besides the person who causes, there is the person who is made to act. In both of the method's examples that second person stands in the instrumental — Дэлгэрмаагаар (by Delgermaa) and хэнээр (by whom) — and the method files both sentences among its instrumental examples. The case itself is in The Mongolian Instrumental: By, With, and In a Language.

Reference grammars of Khalkha add that this person can instead stand in the dative-locative, and call that the commoner of the two options. The method does not use it, so it is flagged here as coming from outside the course and is not tested in the exercises below.

English translation hides this. "Who did you get to help you?" can be put just as fairly as "Who were you helped by?", and the method chooses the second. But the Mongolian is not a passive: it is a causative with its causee marked, and no single English construction matches it.

The passive: –гд–

The passive turns the thing acted upon into the subject. The suffix is –гд–, and it has one shape: it does not harmonise.

Both of those appear in the method with –сан after the voice suffix, and both are doing the job English gives to a passive participle:

• Бид нар олон хэлээр орчуулагдсан толь бичиг худалдаж авсан. "We bought a dictionary that had been translated into several languages."
• хүндлэгдсэн элчин сайд (a respected ambassador)

Three more passives sit in the method's vocabulary, and between them they show the suffix's range. Ялагдах is glossed "to lose", of a fight or a game. Өөрчлөгдөх is "to change, to be changed". And таалагдах is "to please, to be liked": Энэ санаа бидэнд их таалагдлаа. "We liked this idea very much" — word for word, "this idea was much liked to us". Keep that last one in mind. A Mongolian passive very often describes a state of affairs rather than reporting an event with a hidden agent.

Why you will use the passive less than you expect

This is the adaptation that matters, and it is a matter of habit rather than of rule. English reaches for the passive constantly — "the book was written in 1960", "I was told", "it is said" — because English has no other comfortable way to talk about an action whose agent is unimportant or unknown.

Mongolian has another way, and prefers it. Where English says "the book that was given to me by my father", Mongolian puts a participle in front of the noun and leaves everything active: Би аавын өгсөн номыг уншлаа. "I read the book my father gave me." There is no passive anywhere in it. The participle is carrying what the English passive was carrying, and that construction is the single biggest structural difference between the two languages. It has its own page: Mongolian Participles: The Relative Clause Before the Noun.

The cooperative: –лц–

The cooperative says that the action is done jointly, each party to the other. The method's table names the suffix and explains nothing about it — but it hands you the suffix anyway, in four of its vocabulary verbs, and once you see the pattern they stop looking like isolated words:

Read the table downwards and the suffix defines itself. Speaking becomes a conversation, recognising becomes getting to know one another, learning becomes studying alongside others, going in becomes joining in. The sense is not simply "together": it is mutually, each side caught up in the other's action.

The method's worked sentence is Би даргатай ярилцсан. "I talked it over with the boss", and it makes one useful observation: these verbs go with the comitative, the case that answers the English "with". That follows from the sense of the suffix — if the action is mutual, the other party has to be named. See The Mongolian Comitative: The Other "with".

What you should not do is attach –лц– to a verb you have not met it on. The method gives a handful of verbs, not a rule, and a guess may produce a real word with an unexpected meaning, or no word at all.

The collective: –цгаа–

The fourth voice in this slot is –цгаа–, which says that several people are doing the action. It behaves exactly like the other three, and it is the one you meet first and most often, in Сайн байцгаана уу? said to a room rather than to a person. Because it reaches into greetings and into the way Mongolian says "let's", it has a page of its own: –цгаа: The Suffix That Says "all of us, together". What belongs here is only its position in the word.

The intensive –чих–, which shares the slot without being a voice

The method's table puts one more suffix between stem and ending and labels it the intensive. –чих– changes nothing about who does what to whom; it says how thoroughly the thing was done. The method's example is a confession:

• Би шуудангийн чинь хаягийг бүр мартчихсан байна! "I have completely forgotten your postal address!"

Мартчихсан is март– (to forget) plus –чих– plus –сан, and the method gives that segmentation itself. The course uses үзчихсэн and алдчих (to lose an object) in the same way. It belongs on this page because it occupies the same slot, and because the peeling method fails on it for the same reason. Suffixes that build new words out of old ones, on nouns as well as verbs, are collected in Building New Words: The Mongolian Derivational Suffixes.

Reading a three-layer verb

Given a long verb, split it into stem, voice and ending, in that order, and read the pieces. Every form below is the method's:

Four more forms will not split as cleanly, because a vowel has come or gone between stem and suffix: туслуулсан, орчуулагдсан, хүндлэгдсэн, ярилцсан. The voice suffix is still plain in each — –уул–, –гд–, –гд–, –лц– — and seeing it is all you need. The method prints these forms and states no rule for the extra vowel; this page will not invent one.

Then look at the last row twice. There the ending is –на, a finite present-future, and the word is a whole sentence's worth of verb. That is the proof that a voice suffix constrains nothing: once it is in place, the verb takes whatever ending the sentence needs — a tense, a participle, an order, a converb — exactly as a plain stem would. One fact about word architecture, and it unlocks every ending you already know on a second set of verbs.

Beyond the method

Three things the course does not teach, set down so you recognise them in reading. None is used in the exercises.

• There is a second causative suffix, shorter and older: –га–, with the longer form –лга–. It is no longer freely productive and survives in particular verbs you learn as vocabulary. Dictionaries derive сургах (to teach), a word the method does use, from сур– (to learn) in this way — so "to teach" turns out to be "to cause to learn", worn by long use into a word of its own.
• There is a reciprocal suffix –лд–, close to the cooperative in both shape and sense. It is visible in барилдах (to wrestle), which the method teaches as a vocabulary item without taking it apart — two people holding on to each other, which is a fair description of Mongolian wrestling. Recognise it; do not build with it.
• The causee in the dative-locative, described above.