The Five Exceptions to Vowel Harmony

What the rule actually covers

Vowel harmony governs the form of most Mongolian suffixes, including the ten four-form suffixes that carry the everyday language. That is a strong statement and it is the right one. The statement you will often meet instead — that harmony decides the form of every suffix — is not true, and the exceptions are not obscure literary survivals. One of them is the negative suffix, which you will use in your first week. Another is the ending that means with. A third decides how you end a question.

This page exists so that you do not spend a month assuming you have misheard. When a learner who has drilled the harmony table meets ажилгүй or өрөөтэй, the natural reaction is to correct it to something the table would predict. There are five places where the table is simply not in charge, and knowing the five is less work than discovering them one at a time.

1. –гүй never changes

The negative suffix –гүй contains ү, a vowel of the front group, and it keeps it no matter what it is attached to. There is no *–гуй and no *–гөй. One form, always.

• ажилгүй (without work) — from ажил, a word with а and и;
• завгүй (busy, literally without free time) — from зав;
• наргүй (without sun), махгүй (without meat), морьгүй (without a horse), будаагүй (without rice);
• салхигүй (windless), сүүгүй (without milk), хүүхэдгүй (without children);
• болохгүй (not possible, it will not do) and авахгүй (will not take), where it is stuck to a verb rather than a noun.

Back-vowel words and front-vowel words come out the same: ажил, мах and морь are back words, сүү and хүүхэд are front words, and all five end in –гүй. This is the most frequent exception in the language, which is a piece of luck: the thing you will see most often is also the thing with no variation to learn.

Part of why it turns up so often is that it is not fussy about what it joins. It attaches to a plain noun, to an adjective, and to a verb form that already carries its own ending — авахгүй is built on the future participle, суудаггүй on the repetitive one, авсангүй on the past. Each of those endings is harmonic and varies properly; the –гүй behind it does not. So a single word can show harmony working and harmony being ignored, two syllables apart. What –гүй actually does — negate a noun, negate a verb, build an adjective out of an absence — belongs to the page on saying no in Mongolian.

2. The comitative has three forms, not four

The ending that means with exists as –тай, –той and –тэй. There is no fourth form. A word whose vowel is ө does not get *–төй; it gets –тэй, and the method writes it out: өрөө (room) gives өрөөтэй (with a room).

Notice that this is not a gap in the paradigm so much as a merger: the front class, which splits into two elsewhere, does not split here. The fourth column of the four-form table has nothing to answer to on this row.

The merger costs you something when you read. With a four-form suffix the ending tells you about the stem: a word in –өөс has a stem in ө, full stop. A word in –тэй tells you only that its stem is a front word, and leaves you to choose between э, и, ү and ө. That matters when you are trying to work out how the same word would behave under a different suffix, and it is the practical reason to notice the merger rather than simply learn three forms. The uses of the comitative, and the question of which English with it covers, are on the comitative page.

3. бэ and вэ are chosen by a consonant

An open question in Mongolian — one built on a question word rather than answerable by yes or no — ends in a particle, and the particle is бэ or вэ. Both are invariably spelt with э. There is no *ба, no *бө, no *во.

And the choice between the two ignores the vowels of the word in front of it entirely. It is decided by the last consonant: after в, л, м or н you write бэ, and in every other case вэ.

• Хэн ирсэн бэ? (Who came?) — ирсэн ends in н.
• Чи өчигдөр хаашаа явсан бэ? (Where did you go yesterday?) — явсан ends in н, and its vowels are back vowels. Harmony would have predicted something else; the consonant wins.
• Та ямар хотоос ирсэн бэ? (Which town do you come from?)
• Таны нэр хэн бэ? (What is your name?)
• Та юу хийдэг вэ? (What do you do?) — хийдэг ends in г.
• Хаашаа явах вэ? (Where are we going?) — явах ends in х.
• Чиний гэр хаана байна вэ? (Where is your home?) — байна ends in a vowel, so not бэ.

Those four consonants are worth committing to memory, and so is the habit they teach, which is to look at the last consonant of a word instead of its vowels. That habit pays off a second time with the conditional suffix, which begins with б after some stems and with в after others — a narrower rule, and one the method states more cautiously, as noted on the four-form suffix table. The particle system itself — including the yes-or-no particles, which do follow harmony — is set out on the question particles page.

4. The genitive and the accusative oppose two vowels, not four

Two of the seven cases behave as though the language had only two vowel classes, which for these endings is effectively true. Compare:

Where a four-form suffix would offer а, о, э and ө, the genitive offers –ын against –ийн, and the accusative –ыг against –ийг. Words with а, о or у fall on the first side; words with э, и, ө or ү fall on the second. Three front vowels and one neutral vowel all arrive at the same ending. Hence малын (of the livestock) and багшийн (of the teacher), гарыг (the hand, as object) and хүнийг (the person, as object).

Be careful what you conclude from this. The two-way split is not the whole story for either case: both have further forms that depend on the letter the word ends in rather than on its vowels, and the genitive in particular keeps a residue that has to be learnt word by word. The method gives examples rather than a rule for it, and the honest version of the arithmetic is laid out in the decision tree for case endings. What belongs here is only the narrow point: when you reach for one of these two cases, you are choosing between two vowels, not four.

5. Compound words harmonise one piece at a time

Harmony is a property of a word. A compound made of two words is, for this purpose, two words, and each piece keeps its own vowels. Mongolian personal names show it most clearly, because so many of them are built from two elements:

• Батгэрэл, from Бат (firm, strong) and Гэрэл (light) — а in the first half, э in the second;
• Алтанцэцэг, from Алтан (golden) and Цэцэг (flower);
• Сарангэрэл, from Саран (moon) and Гэрэл;
• Оюунбаатар, from Оюун (wisdom) and Баатар (hero).

None of these is a harmony failure. Each half is harmonic on its own. The same holds for ordinary compounds such as галт тэрэг (train), where галт has а and тэрэг has э.

The practical consequence is a rule about suffixes: a suffix added to a compound agrees with the last element, because that is the element it is actually touching. Дэлгэрмаа takes the instrumental as Дэлгэрмаагаар, with the vowel of маа and not of Дэлгэр. галт тэрэг gives галт тэргээр, front vowels throughout the ending, although the first word of the pair is back. Look at the end of the word, never at the beginning.

Three things that are not exceptions

Half of learning this list is learning what does not belong on it, because three regular features of the language look like exceptions and are not.

• The neutral vowel. и sides with the front endings and never decides anything by itself. That is part of the rule, not a breach of it. The consonant й is transparent to harmony for the same reason.
• The conditional in б. явбал beside уншвал is a consonant matter. The vowel is still harmonic: эхэлбэл has б because of the л and э because of the э.
• Linking letters and dropped vowels. хөдөөнөөс has an extra н and өчигдрөөс is missing a vowel, but the suffix in both is the one harmony predicts. Those adjustments are spelling, and they live on the page on how a Mongolian word is built.

How to carry the list

The reason to learn five exceptions as a closed set rather than as five surprises is that it lets you trust the rule everywhere else. When you write a suffix and the vowel looks wrong, run the list: is it –гүй? is it the comitative with no ө form? is it a question particle, where a consonant decides? is it the genitive or the accusative, where there are only two choices? is the word a compound, so that only its last piece counts? If the answer is no five times, the vowel really is wrong, and the rule will tell you what it should have been.