Every Form of One Mongolian Verb

A page to look things up in

Most of the pages in this guide argue something. This one does not. The method's appendix takes a single verb and writes it out in every ending it teaches, so that the whole inventory sits in front of you at once and a form you have met in a sentence can be found without knowing its name. What follows is that inventory, regrouped into four blocks, with an English equivalent for each row and a link to the page that says what the form is for.

The verb is ажиллах (to work). It was chosen because it is long, regular and perfectly ordinary, which makes every join visible. Strip the –х and you have the stem the whole table is built on. In this verb the stem is written ажилл–, and an а appears between the stem and most endings as a connecting vowel: ажилл– plus –сан is written ажилласан, not ажиллсан. Keep that in mind and the long forms below stop looking strange.

One more thing before the list. Every suffix here is printed in one shape. Many of them have four, chosen by the vowels of the stem they attach to, and the complete set lives on the four-form suffix table. Read the two pages side by side rather than expecting either one to do both jobs: this page tells you which ending exists, that one tells you which of its shapes to write.

The seven to learn first

The appendix runs to more than thirty rows, and a beginner does not need thirty. The method isolates seven at the front, and with those seven you can hold a conversation. Here they are on the same stem, in the order the method gives them.

Those seven cover an ordinary day. Six of them are a single suffix on a single stem, which is why the list is short enough to hold after an afternoon; only –маар байна needs a second word behind the verb. Notice also that all seven are written here with an а at the join, because that is the vowel this particular stem calls for. Put the same seven endings on a stem whose vowels belong to the other class and every one of them is spelled differently without a single row being added or taken away. That second stem, and the spellings, are on the four-form suffix table, and the division of labour is exactly that: here the ending, there its shape.

Three layers, four blocks

The thirty-odd endings are not a flat list. Mongolian builds its verb in three layers, and this guide always names them in the same order: finite indicatives, which close a sentence and fix its time; participles, which can close a sentence but can also stand in front of a noun; and converbs, which end a clause but leave the sentence open for the verb that follows. The table below has a block for each, plus a fourth for the imperatives, which stand apart because they do not locate an action in time at all.

Knowing which block a form belongs to is more useful than knowing its label, because the block tells you what to expect after the word. A converb means another verb is coming. A finite indicative means the sentence is finished.

Block 1: participles

What these five do in a sentence, and why the construction they make has no English counterpart, is on the page on participles.

Block 2: finite indicatives

Four of them, which is why nobody should say that Mongolian has no tenses. –на and its three sisters are set out on the page on the present and future; the other three, and the choice between them, on the page on the past.

Block 3: imperatives

One note on that block before you use it. The appendix groups six of these rows as imperatives and files –тугай somewhere else entirely, among the other forms, under the name concessive; it is shown here with the rest because what it does is ask. What no row here shows is how much distance each form puts between you and the person you are addressing, and that is the whole difficulty. It is settled on the page on imperatives, which counts its six degrees of asking differently from this table: it sets out the bare stem, the doubled stem, –аарай, –ч, –ъя and –цгаа– as the forms you choose between, and treats –г and –гтун as reading knowledge.

Block 4: converbs and the other forms

Notice the last five rows: they end in a dash, and that is not a typographical habit. Those five are not finished words. They are new stems, and they still need an ending from one of the other blocks before they can appear in a sentence — ажиллуулсан, ажиллуулна, ажиллуулаарай. They are the one part of the table that changes how a word is read rather than what it means in time, and they have their own page, verb voices. The clause-linking rows above them belong to the page on converbs.

Five cells to read with care

A table built on one verb is the clearest way to show an inventory and the worst way to show spelling, because every join in it is the join that this verb makes. Five cells above need a word said about them, and saying it is more use than quietly tidying them up.

• The bare-stem imperative is shown here as ир! (come!), from the method's own sentence Маргааш ир! (come back tomorrow!). The appendix prints this cell for ажиллах as ажил, which is also the ordinary noun (work); a short consonant-final stem shows the form far more plainly.
• The –жээ cell is shown as байжээ, which is the form in the method's own example sentence. The appendix writes this one row with the stem shortened to ажил–.
• The –саар cell is shown as орсоор, again from a real sentence in the method. The appendix writes it with the same shortened stem.
• The –тугай row carries no example anywhere in the method, and none has been supplied here. The suffix is listed; the sentence is not.
• On this particular stem the participle in –аа and the indicative in –лаа come out looking identical, both ажиллаа. They are two different endings, and they only collide because the stem already ends in a vowel. Elsewhere they look nothing alike: the participle turns up in байгаа and inside үзээгүй (has not seen), the indicative in ирлээ, явлаа and зогслоо.

Using the table backwards

The commoner need is the reverse one: you have met a word, you cannot find it in a dictionary, and you want to know what has been done to it. Work from the right.

1. Take the last two or three letters and look for them in the Suffix column. Mongolian endings are short and there are not many of them, so this succeeds more often than it has any right to.
2. Note which block you landed in. That already tells you whether the sentence has ended, whether another verb is coming, or whether somebody is being asked to do something.
3. Remove the ending, and remove a connecting vowel if one is left behind. What remains is the stem.
4. Add –х back on and look that up. ажилласан leaves ажилла–, which gives ажиллах, and now the dictionary will answer you.

Step four is the one beginners skip, and it is the one that matters, because dictionaries list the –х form and nothing else. Every single row of this table is a form you will not find under its own spelling.

The one place a form changes between two sentences

There is a pattern in the method worth having at the front of your mind, because it is the first thing that happens when somebody speaks to you. A question about the future is asked with the –х participle, and the answer comes back with the present-future –на. The stem does not move. Only the ending is swapped.

• Та хэзээ явах вэ? (when will you leave?) and the answer Маргааш өглөө эрт явна. (we leave early tomorrow morning.)
• Та тийшээ юугаар явах вэ? (how will you go there?) and Бид машинаар Ховд аймаг хүртэл явна. (we go by car as far as Khovd province.)
• Чи нөгөөдөр юу хийх вэ? (what are you doing the day after tomorrow?)

Laid out morpheme by morpheme, the swap is the whole of it:

• Та хэзээ явах вэ?
• you when go-PART Q
• "When are you leaving?"

• Маргааш өглөө эрт явна.
• tomorrow morning early go-PRES-FUT
• "We leave early tomorrow morning."

English has no equivalent reflex, because an English question and its answer use the same verb form: will you leave, I will leave. In Mongolian the question form and the statement form are two different rows of this table, and answering a –х question with a –х form is one of the two or three mistakes that mark a foreigner immediately.

The negative answer stays in the question's own form and adds to it: Явахгүй! (I'm not going!), Уухгүй! (I won't drink!). Why the negative attaches there rather than anywhere else is on the page on saying no.

What the table cannot tell you

Three things, and it is worth naming them so that you do not search the table for answers it does not hold. It does not tell you who is doing the action: a Mongolian verb form is the same for every person, and the subject is a separate word or is simply understood — that is the point made on the page on verbs. It does not tell you which of a suffix's shapes to write. And it does not tell you which form to choose when two of them could carry your meaning, which is the real work and is distributed over the pages linked from each block above.

What it does tell you, and no other page does, is the size of the problem. Thirty endings is not many. English verbs take five forms and then hand the rest of the job to a crowd of auxiliaries and particles that no table can hold. Mongolian puts almost everything into the word itself, which means the inventory is finite, printable, and sitting above you.