How a Mongolian Verb Works

Three facts, and the rest of the system follows

The Mongolian verb has a reputation for difficulty that it does not fully deserve. What makes it feel foreign is not complexity but a different division of labour: Mongolian puts almost nothing into agreement and almost everything into the choice of suffix. Three facts set up the whole of it.

1. A verb appears in the dictionary ending in –х.
2. Take that –х off and what remains is the stem, which never changes.
3. Add one suffix to the stem and you have a finished verb — and the same finished verb serves every person and every number.

Fact three is the one worth sitting with, because it deletes something English speakers assume is unavoidable. There is no conjugation to learn. Not a short one, not an irregular one: none.

Taking the –х off

This is mechanical, with one catch that costs beginners weeks.

The catch is in the second column of letters. The vowel sitting in front of –х belongs to the ending, not to the stem. The stem of авах is ав– and not ава–; the stem of өгөх is өг– and not өгө–; the stem of очих is оч–. Beginners who keep that vowel produce forms one syllable too long for the rest of their lives, and the error is invisible to them because the longer form looks more like the dictionary entry. Two rows behave slightly differently and are worth noting as they come: ярих leaves a soft sign on the stem, ярь–, and хийх leaves a stem that ends in a vowel letter, хий–.

Four of these stems are used throughout this grammar as the model series, one for each class of vowel: ав–, оч–, ир–, өг–. Whenever a suffix has four shapes, those are the four stems it is shown on, and they are set out side by side on the four-form suffix table.

One form for every person

The course states the rule flatly: the ending of the verb does not change with the subject. So Би ажилладаг (I work) and Тэд ажилладаг (they work) carry the identical verb. Applied to the present-future of яв–, the rule produces this:

That table has nothing in it to memorise, and nothing in it to check: it is one form, written out seven times, because the rule says there is one form. Compare what English asks of a learner for the single verb work — work, works, worked, working, will work, do you work — and remember that English is the simple case, as European languages go. Mongolian has nothing corresponding to the -s of he works, nothing corresponding to the auxiliary do, and no list of irregular verbs at all.

The person is carried by the pronoun instead, and the pronouns are irregular enough to be worth their own page, personal pronouns and possessives. When the person is clear from the situation, the pronoun is routinely left out, and then the sentence tells you nothing about who is acting — which sounds alarming and almost never is, because context has already told you.

What the suffix carries instead

If the suffix is not spending itself on agreement, it is free to carry something more interesting. Here is one stem taken through nine endings. Every form is a complete verb, and every one of them works for any subject:

• ажиллана (works, will work)
• ажилласан (worked)
• ажилладаг (works as a habit)
• ажиллаж байна (is working right now)
• ажиллаад (having worked, and then)
• ажиллавал (if one works)
• ажилламаар байна (wants to work)
• ажиллаарай (do work, please)
• ажиллъя (let me work, let us work)

Look at what the list does to English. Four of those nine need an extra word in English — will, is, if, wants to — and two of them need two. Mongolian puts the distinction inside the verb, where English puts it in front of the verb. That is the real shape of the difficulty: not that the forms are hard, but that you must choose one at the moment of speaking, where English lets you assemble the meaning from parts as you go.

This page explains none of those nine endings. That is deliberate, and it is how this grammar is organised: each suffix is set out where it belongs, with its own examples and its own exercises, and the map below says where.

The three layers

Mongolian verb forms fall into three groups, and this grammar always names them in the same order: finite indicatives, participles, converbs.

It is worth saying clearly what that does and does not mean, because the point is often put badly. Mongolian does not do without tenses. It has four finite indicative forms, which behave much as an English tense does: they close a sentence and state that something is the case. What Mongolian adds is two further layers on top, and it uses them so freely that an English speaker reading a Mongolian paragraph will meet more participles and converbs than finite verbs.

Three consequences of this architecture reach into the rest of the grammar, and they are the reason the layers are introduced here rather than left implicit.

First, the everyday Mongolian past, –сан, is a participle rather than a finite indicative. It is the form you will use constantly, and knowing what it is explains why it can also sit in front of a noun. Second, where English says the book you wrote, Mongolian puts a participle in front of the noun — таны бичсэн ном — so the layer is not an advanced topic but a first-month necessity. Third, there is no Mongolian word for and joining two actions, nor for if, nor for after: the first verb changes its ending instead. A sentence with three verbs in it has one finite form, at the end, and two converbs leading up to it.

There is also a set of suffixes that slot in between the stem and the ending, changing who does the action to whom — causative, passive, cooperative, collective. They are not a layer of their own and they are easy to miss when you are cutting a word apart, which is why they have a page: causative, passive and cooperative verbs.

The question in –х, the answer in –на

One habit of Mongolian dialogue is worth learning on day one, because it is a pattern rather than a rule about meaning. A question very often puts its verb in the –х form, and the answer switches to a finite indicative:

• Та хэзээ явах вэ? (when will you leave?) — Маргааш өглөө эрт явна. (we leave early tomorrow morning)
• Хэн хөдөө явах вэ? (who is going to the countryside?) — Бид тийшээ хамт явна. (we are going there together)
• Та тийшээ юугаар явах вэ? (how will you get there?) — Бид машинаар Ховд аймаг хүртэл явна. (we will go by car as far as Khovd province)
• Та нар хичээлээ өнөө орой давтах уу? (will you revise your lesson this evening?) — Үгүй, харин бид монгол хөгжим сонсоно. (no, we are going to listen to Mongolian music)

Notice that the shift happens with both kinds of question, the open one and the closed one. What you must not do is answer a question in the same form it was asked in: the question form and the statement form are different, and reusing the question's –х in your reply leaves the sentence unfinished to a Mongolian ear. The particles at the end of those questions are a separate subject, on question particles.

What is genuinely difficult, and what is not

Nothing on this page is difficult. The difficulty of the Mongolian verb is concentrated in two places, and it is useful to know in advance where they are.

The first is choosing among forms that English does not distinguish. I drink tea is three different sentences in Mongolian depending on whether you mean right now, as a habit, or in a minute, and you cannot avoid the choice. That is the subject of present and future, and it is the single most expensive page in this family.

The second is the vowel of the suffix. Every ending in the lists above has up to four written shapes, and which one you use depends on the vowels of the stem. That is not a verb problem but a whole-language problem, and it is settled by the harmony rule and the table that goes with it. The joint between stem and ending is sometimes tidied up as well — a dropped vowel, an inserted letter — and that is on how a Mongolian word is built.

What is not difficult, and what you should stop spending effort on: agreement, which does not exist; irregular stems, which do not exist; and the dictionary form, which is always the ending –х and nothing else.

Where to go from here

The full inventory of forms, one stem taken through all of them with a translation on each line, is the reference page of this family: Mongolian verb forms. Read it beside the four-form suffix table rather than trying to learn it. For the rest, the order that works is tense first, then the two extra layers, then the odd corners: present and future, the past, participles, converbs, imperatives, and then what English handles with modal verbs and Mongolian does not: can, must, want, like. The verb байх, which is both a verb in its own right and the auxiliary inside several of the forms above, has its own page, and so does the business of saying that something did not happen: saying no in Mongolian.