The Four-Form Suffix Table

The stem, and the two letters you take off first

Every suffix on this page attaches to a stem, and a Mongolian verb stem is not what the dictionary prints. The dictionary gives авах (to take), очих (to go to, to visit), ирэх (to come), өгөх (to give). Remove the final –х and you have the stem: ав–, оч–, ир–, өг–. Nothing else is removed, and nothing is added back. An English speaker is used to a dictionary entry that is already a usable word — take is both the entry and the imperative — so the habit of cutting two letters off before you begin takes a few days to form.

Those four stems carry the whole table below, and they were not chosen at random. Between them they show the four shapes a Mongolian suffix can wear, one stem per shape, which is why the method drills them together as a set: авсан, очсон, ирсэн, өгсөн. Four stems, one suffix, four spellings, and the same meaning in all four.

Why four columns and not two

The word you are adding to belongs to one of two vowel classes, and the suffix has to match it. That much is the rule, and it is set out on its own page. What the rule does not tell you is why a matching suffix has four spellings instead of two, and the answer is that the class is crossed with a second, narrower distinction: whether the deciding vowel is a rounded one.

So the four columns of the table are not four classes of equal weight. They are two classes, each split once:

• a word whose vowels are а or у takes the first column;
• a word whose vowel is о takes the second;
• a word whose vowels are э, и or ү takes the third;
• a word whose vowel is ө takes the fourth.

Columns one and two are the same class seen twice; so are columns three and four. That is worth knowing because it tells you what kind of mistake you have made. Writing очсан for очсон is a wrong column inside the right class. Writing очсэн crosses the class line altogether, and that is the error that makes a word unreadable rather than merely misspelt. The columns are always printed in the order a / o / e / ö, on this page and everywhere else in this guide, so that the fourth cell of a row is always the ө cell and you stop having to read the headings.

Which column a given word takes is a question about the word, not about the suffix, and it is answered on the vowel harmony page, including the case of a word that contains vowels from more than one group.

The table

Ten suffixes, forty forms. The example in each cell is the one the method gives, so that you are reading real forms and not forms built by machine from a rule.

Two rows step outside the four model stems, and it is worth saying why rather than letting you wonder. The first two suffixes attach to nouns, not to verbs, so the method illustrates them with nouns: Франц (France), хот (town, city), гэр (ger, home), автобус (bus), мод (wood, tree), мөнгө (money, silver). And the conditional row keeps the stems the method uses for it — унш– (to read), ор– (to enter, and of rain, to fall) — because they are the forms you will actually meet.

Two cells also carry a visible complication that belongs to another page. өчигдрөөс comes from өчигдөр (yesterday), and the short vowel of the last syllable has dropped out before the suffix. галт тэргээр comes from галт тэрэг (train), where the same thing happens. Neither is a harmony question. Spelling adjustments of that kind are collected on the page on how a Mongolian word is built.

The cell that is empty, and why it stays empty

The fourth cell of the immediate indicative row has no example. The method lists –лөө in its table of verb forms and gives no word built with it. That gap is left visible here on purpose. A form produced by applying a rule to a paradigm is not the same thing as a form someone says, and the usual way a learner's table goes wrong is that somebody fills the hole to make the grid look finished. If you meet –лөө in a real sentence, you now know what it is; what you do not have is a model word for it from this method.

The conditional has a second series

One row of the table is really two. Alongside –вал / –вол / –вэл / –вөл the method also uses a second series in б, with the same vowels and the same meaning, of which it writes out –бал and –бэл. The choice between the two series has nothing to do with harmony: it depends on the last consonant of the stem. Every example the method gives of the б series is built on a stem ending in в or л:

• яв– gives явбал, not *яввал;
• дуул– gives дуулбал;
• эхэл– gives эхэлбэл;
• унш– gives уншвал, because ш is not one of those two letters;
• ир– gives ирвэл and ор– gives орвол, both on a stem in р.

Keep the two questions apart in your head and this never becomes confusing: the consonant of the stem picks the series, and the vowel of the stem picks the column inside it. эхэлбэл has б because of the л, and э because of the э. Those are two separate decisions that happen to land on the same letter sequence.

It is worth saying what the method does not claim here. It states the б series as a tendency after л and в, and then tells you to learn these forms as they come and let your ear do the rest. So treat the two series as a pair you recognise rather than a rule you apply to a stem you have never heard, and do not extend the list of triggering consonants on your own. The habit it teaches — read the last consonant, not the vowels — comes back once more in the grammar, in the choice between the question particles бэ and вэ, which is one of the five cases collected on the page on the suffixes that do not follow harmony.

Reading the table backwards

You will spend more time reading Mongolian than building it, and the table is at least as useful in the other direction. A word ends in –дөг: that is the fifth row, fourth column, so the word is a repetitive participle on a stem whose vowel is ө. A word ends in –оод: ninth row, second column, perfective, stem in о. The suffix tells you what the word is doing; the vowel inside the suffix tells you something about the stem you are about to look up, which is a genuine help when the stem itself has been shortened.

It also warns you off a wrong guess. Nothing in this table ends in –сөн except the finite participle, and nothing at all in the four-form system mixes a back vowel with a front one. An ending that mixes a back vowel with a front one, such as –одог or –эсан, is not a Mongolian word.

What this table does not decide

It gives shape, and only shape. It does not tell you when to reach for one of these suffixes rather than another, and it would be a poor guide if it tried: the difference between –даг and –на is not a spelling matter but a difference in what you are saying, and each suffix has a page where that is the whole subject. The ablative and the instrumental are cases, with their own pages in the family of the seven cases. The present-future, the perfective, the conditional and the rest belong to the pages on the verb.

Two more limits, both important:

• Forty forms are not all the forms. Mongolian has suffixes that do not vary at all, suffixes with three forms, and suffixes that choose their vowel on a different basis entirely. They are counted and named on the page on the suffixes that do not follow harmony, and the list is short enough to learn.
• Choosing the right column is not the same as choosing the right ending. For several of the seven cases, the letter the word ends in matters as much as the vowels inside it, and the decision tree for case endings crosses the two.

Using it in three seconds

In practice you do three things in order, and only the first is new to you.

1. Get the stem. Verb: strike the –х. Noun: it is already the stem.
2. Look at the vowels and pick the column. Ignore и, which sides with the third column and never decides anything on its own.
3. Take the cell. Do not rebuild the suffix from memory of the rule — read it off the row, the way you would read a verb off a conjugation chart until you no longer need the chart.

Eight or ten words of practice per suffix and the table stops being something you consult. It takes about a week, and it is the single highest-value week in Mongolian, because these ten suffixes are the ones that come back in every sentence you will hear.