Building New Words From Old Ones

The cheapest vocabulary is the vocabulary you never learn

English does have word formation. From work you get worker, workable, workless. But English learners cannot rely on it, because half the vocabulary came in from Latin and French with a second set of suffixes that do not combine with the first: a doctor is not a medicine-er, and nothing about equine tells you it has to do with a horse. Mongolian has had far less of that, and its derivational suffixes attach to the words you already know. Learn the stem мал (livestock) and you have also, for free, the person who keeps it.

This page is about the suffixes that build new words, as opposed to the ones that say how a word is being used in a sentence. The two kinds look alike and sit in the same place, and the technique for cutting any long word into its pieces is on how a Mongolian word is built. What follows is the other half of the job: once you have the pieces, what do they mean, and can you guess the word from them.

People from things: –ч and –чин

The single most productive pattern in the language takes a noun for a thing and gives you the person who deals in it. Two suffixes do this, and both are extremely common:

The method's own word lists are full of both shapes. With –ч: жолооч (driver), хөтөч (guide), хуульч (lawyer), сэтгүүлч (journalist), зохиолч (writer), зураач (painter), судлаач (researcher), бичээч (clerk, secretary). With –чин: жуулчин (tourist), наймаачин (trader), тариачин (farmer), саальчин (milker), хончин (shepherd), нүүдэлчин (nomad), жүжигчин (actor), хөгжимчин (musician).

Now the honest part. Nothing predicts which of the two a given base takes. хууль gives хуульч but мал gives малчин, and no feature of the two nouns explains the difference. You do not need to predict it in order to read, which is the point of the pattern: both endings mean the same thing, so a word ending in either one is a person, and the front of the word tells you which kind. You only need to choose when you are producing a word yourself, and then you look it up. Do not manufacture *малч by analogy.

Doers from verbs: –гч

Where –ч and –чин work on nouns, –гч works on verb stems, and it is the closest thing Mongolian has to English -er:

• орчуул– (to translate) gives орчуулагч (translator);
• худалд– (to sell) gives худалдагч (seller);
• найруул– gives найруулагч (director);
• and from the same family come сурагч (pupil), сувилагч (nurse), үйлчлэгч (waiter, attendant) and ерөнхийлөгч (president).

Two things to notice. A vowel appears between the stem and the ending, and it follows the vowels of the stem: орчуулагч with а, үйлчлэгч with э, ерөнхийлөгч with ө. That is ordinary vowel harmony, settled by the harmony rule and not a separate thing to learn. And –гч has a second life as one of the five Mongolian participles, which is why орчуулагч can be read as a noun meaning a translator or as a verb form meaning translating, depending on where it sits. That double duty is treated on Mongolian participles.

Adjectives from nouns: –тай and –гүй

This is the pair worth learning on the first day, because between them they turn almost any noun into an adjective and its opposite. –тай says having it; –гүй says not having it.

English has -y, -ful, -ous, -ed and three or four others on the positive side, and only -less on the negative, and none of them is safe to extend: windy is a word and mindy is not, priceless exists but means almost the reverse of what its parts say. In Mongolian the two endings go on nearly anything and mean exactly what their parts say. That makes a short vocabulary list go a very long way.

Two mechanical details, both of which have pages of their own. –тай has only three written forms — –тай, –той, –тэй, with nothing in ө — and –гүй has exactly one and never changes, which makes it the most frequently met exception to vowel harmony in the whole language. Both facts are set out on the suffixes that do not follow vowel harmony. And –тай is the same ending as the comitative case, which has its own page; how the resulting adjectives are compared and put in the superlative is on Mongolian adjectives.

One small trap in the table. нар means sun, and нартай is sunny — but нар written after another noun is the plural word, as in найз нар (the friends). Same four letters, two unrelated jobs, and only the position tells you which. The plural is on the Mongolian plural.

Chains, and how far they go

Because each suffix leaves the word intact, derivations stack into chains, and the longest useful ones go verb to noun to adjective. сонирхол (an interest) is itself built on the verb сонирх– (to take an interest in) with the noun-forming –л; put –той on the result and you get сонирхолтой (interesting), which is one of the first adjectives in the course. Three steps, three recognisable pieces, and the meaning of the last one is the sum of the first two.

Compounds: two words, one idea

The other way Mongolian makes vocabulary is to put two existing words side by side and let the pair mean something the parts do not. These come in two shapes. In the first, the two words simply stand together:

• хүн ам (population, literally person and mouth);
• гэр бүл (family, literally ger and group);
• ард түмэн (the people);
• цаг агаар (weather, literally time and air);
• аж үйлдвэр (industry);
• зочид буудал (hotel, literally guests' stopping place);
• их сургууль (university, literally the big school);
• Цагаан сар (the lunar new year, literally the white month).

In the second, the first word carries a genitive ending, so the compound is literally an of phrase that has set hard:

• онгоцны буудал (airport, the stopping place of aircraft);
• хүнсний дэлгүүр (food shop);
• цайны газар (canteen, the place of tea);
• гарын хуруу (finger, the finger of the hand).

Both shapes have the same two consequences, and both are worth stating because beginners trip on them. First, a compound is inflected once, at the very end: онгоцны буудал gives онгоцны буудлаас (from the airport) and зочид буудал gives зочид буудалд (at the hotel). The first element does not move. Second, each element keeps its own vowels, so a compound can contain two different vowel classes and still be perfectly correct — цаг агаар and гэр бүл both do. Why that is not a breach of vowel harmony is set out on the suffixes that do not follow vowel harmony; all you need here is that a compound is two units, and counting the units is what tells you a compound from a long single word.

Verbs make vocabulary in pairs

Mongolian also builds fixed meanings by pairing two verbs, the first in its –ж form and the second carrying the grammar. The combination is often not guessable from the parts, so these are vocabulary rather than syntax:

• хэлж өг– (to tell someone, literally to say and give);
• зааж өг– (to show, to point out);
• хайж өг– (to find for someone);
• гарч ир– (to come out, to emerge);
• авч яв– (to carry, literally to take and go);
• мэдэж ав– (to learn, literally to know and take);
• асууж сур– (to find out by asking).

The grammar of a sentence with two verbs in it, and the –ж form itself, belong to sentences with two verbs and Mongolian converbs. What belongs here is the lexical observation: when a verb pair keeps turning up, learn it as one item, the way you learned look up and look after in English.

When the ending is not derivation at all

Three of the endings on this page have a second job, and mistaking one for the other is the commonest way a confident guess goes wrong.

• –ч on a verb stem is not the agent suffix but a spoken request: заагаач is teach me, not a teacher, and өгөөч is give me, not a giver. The tell is the long vowel in front of the –ч, which the agent suffix does not have. See Mongolian imperatives.
• –гүй on a verb form is not an adjective but a negation: явахгүй is will not go and болохгүй is that will not do. See saying no in Mongolian.
• –тай on a noun in a sentence may be the comitative case rather than a derived adjective: ээжтэй is with mother in one sentence and having a mother in another.

The discriminator is the base, not the ending. Ask yourself whether what sits in front of the suffix is a noun or a verb stem, and then ask what the word is doing in the sentence — naming a thing, describing a thing, or reporting an action. Mongolian will not tell you by changing the shape, because it has no shape left to change; the information is in the position and in the stem.

Using this while reading

The practical routine on an unknown word is short. Strip anything at the end that says how the word is used in the sentence — a case ending, a plural, a reflexive — and you are left with the dictionary word. Look at what remains for one of the pieces on this page. If you find one, the front of the word is the base, and the base is probably something you know. найруулагчдаас is a wall of letters until you see –гч in the middle of it, at which point it is from the people who do something, and the stem tells you what.

Two reminders about what is settled elsewhere. Which vowel each suffix wears is decided by harmony and by the four-form suffix table, never by this page. The fixed sequence in which several suffixes queue up behind a stem is on the order in which suffixes stack. And the suffixes that change what a verb does to its object — causative, passive, cooperative — are a different system again, on causative, passive and cooperative verbs.