Mongolian Word Order

An English sentence puts its verb in second position and gets on with it. The lama came back from the monastery yesterday tells you within two words what kind of event you are hearing about. Mongolian does the opposite: it assembles everything first and delivers the verb last.

• Лам Амарбаясгалант хийдээс өчигдөр ирсэн.
• lama-NOM Amarbayasgalant monastery-ABL yesterday come-PAST
• "The lama came back from Amarbayasgalant monastery yesterday."

Nothing in that sentence is scrambled. It is built on a scheme you can apply to any Mongolian sentence you meet, and the scheme has three blocks.

The three blocks

First the subject. Then everything that fills the sentence out — objects, places, times, manner. Then the predicate, which closes it.

• Бид маргааш өглөө зах руу явна.
• we-NOM tomorrow morning market to go-PRES-FUT
• "We are going to the market tomorrow morning."

The third row is worth a second look, because both of its first two blocks are two words long and neither is a mistake: Сургуулийн захиргаа is one subject made of a genitive and a noun, and хичээлийн төлөвлөгөө is one object built the same way. A block is not a word. It is a slot, and a slot can be filled by a group.

The predicate closes the sentence, and the predicate need not be a verb

The word that ends a Mongolian sentence is the one that carries the grammar: tense, mood, negation, and the question particle if there is one. That is why you cannot translate a Mongolian sentence as it arrives. You have to hold it and wait, which is a listening skill rather than a grammar point, and the page on rhythm describes what it feels like in real speech.

The predicate is often a verb. It is just as often a noun or an adjective:

• Би багш. (I am a teacher.)
• Тэр малчин. (He is a herder.)
• Энэ кино сайн. (This film is good.)
• Энэ миний найз. (This is my friend.)
• Би өнөөдөр завгүй. (I have no free time today.)

There is no verb in any of those, and none is missing. The position at the end of the sentence is what makes багш a predicate rather than a second subject. When Mongolian keeps байна in such a sentence and when it leaves it out is a separate question, answered on the page on "to be" and "to have".

A modifier always precedes what it modifies

This is the rule the method calls immutable, and it has no exceptions. Whatever narrows, describes, specifies or possesses a noun stands in front of it, and nothing agrees with anything.

Two of those rows reverse the English order outright. A teacher of Mongolian puts the specification after the noun; монгол хэлний багш puts it before, and the genitive ending marks it — that ending, and the choice between its forms, belongs to the genitive. The book you wrote is a whole clause sitting after the noun in English, and in Mongolian it is three words in front of it, with no relative pronoun anywhere: таны бичсэн ном, literally your-written-book. That construction is the single widest gap between the two languages and it has its own page.

The test that proves the rule

Take an adjective out of the front and put it at the end, and you have not reordered a phrase — you have made a sentence.

The words are identical. Only the order has changed, and the order alone decides whether өндөр is describing a mountain or asserting something about it. English can do nothing of the kind: high mountain and mountain high are not a phrase and a sentence. This is the clearest demonstration in the language that Mongolian word order is grammar and not style. That adjectives never change their shape in either position is dealt with on the page on adjectives.

The middle block circulates

Inside the second block the order is loose, because the case endings already say who does what to whom. All of these are ordinary sentences:

• Би түүнтэй өчигдөр уулзсан. (I met him yesterday.)
• Тэр өчигдөр надад хэлсэн. (He told me yesterday.)
• Бид ажлынхаа тухай ярилцсан. (We talked about our work.)
• Би тэднийг гэрт харсан. (I saw them in the ger.)

In the first of those, түүнтэй and өчигдөр could trade places and the sentence would still mean what it means, because –тэй marks the person accompanied and nothing marks the time word at all. What you cannot do is move either of them behind уулзсан.

One thing in the middle block is not loose. A noun with no ending on it, acting as an object, sits immediately before the verb — in Би ном худалдаж авсан ("I bought a book"), ном is pressed up against the predicate. When an object carries no ending, its position is the only thing telling you it is an object, so that position stops being negotiable. Why the ending is sometimes absent is explained on the page on having no articles.

Time, place and manner

A time word normally follows the subject and precedes everything verbal:

• Баатар маргааш ирнэ. (Baatar will come tomorrow.)
• Энэ малчин удахгүй ирнэ. (This herder will come soon.)
• Тэр саяхан хөдөөнөөс ирсэн. (He came back from the countryside recently.)

A place expression also comes before the verb, whether it is a destination, a location or an origin: зах руу явна, Улаанбаатарт байдаг, хөдөөнөөс ирсэн. Which ending each of those needs is a matter for the cases, not for word order. Time phrases built on a postposition — хоёр жилийн өмнө ("two years ago") — keep the same slot, and the page on postpositions covers how they are assembled.

An adverb of manner sits as close to the verb as it can get, which in practice means directly in front of it:

• Миний оюутан хичээлээ сайн хийсэн. (My student did his lesson well.)
• Оюунбаатар муу дуулав. (Oyunbaatar sang badly.)
• Эгч удаан ярьж байна. (My elder sister is speaking slowly.)

That is the same rule as the one about modifiers, applied to a verb instead of a noun: what qualifies something goes in front of it.

Turning an English sentence round

Four steps, in this order, will get you a correct Mongolian sentence nine times out of ten.

1. Find the subject and put it first.
2. Take every modifier and move it in front of the noun it belongs to.
3. Put the time, the place and the objects in the middle, each with its ending.
4. Put the verb last and load the tense, the negation and any question particle onto it.

Applied to I met him yesterday: the subject is Би; him is the person met, which this verb expresses with the comitative, түүнтэй; the time is өчигдөр; the verb goes last in its past form. The result is Би түүнтэй өчигдөр уулзсан. Applied to the school administration issued the lesson plan, the two genitive modifiers move in front of their nouns and the verb drops to the end: Сургуулийн захиргаа хичээлийн төлөвлөгөө гаргав.

The order that bends

It would be convenient to say that Mongolian is strictly subject-object-verb, and it would be false. The method itself records a literary order in which the subject arrives last:

• Өргөн талд өссөн би
• wide steppe-DAT grow.up-PART I-NOM
• "I, who grew up in the wide steppe"

You will meet this in writing, in song and in anything with a deliberate shape to it. Hold on to the accurate version of the rule instead of the tidy one: the predicate closes the sentence, the secondary elements circulate among themselves, and a writer may put the subject at the end for effect. The rule with no exceptions at all is the other one, about modifiers.

One more thing does not disturb the order, and English speakers expect it to. A question keeps exactly the word order of the statement; nothing inverts, nothing moves to the front. The question is signalled by a particle at the very end, after the predicate: Энэ гадаад хүн хаанаас ирсэн бэ? ("Where does this foreigner come from?"), where even the question word хаанаас stays in the middle block in the slot an ordinary place expression would occupy. The particles themselves, and the choice between them, are on the page on question particles.

Finally, a sentence with two or three verbs in it does not break the scheme. The verbs line up at the end in the order the actions happen, and only the last one is inflected: Бид танай гэрт орж үзэж болох уу? ("May we come into your ger and look?"). The predicate block has simply grown, and the page on two-verb sentences takes it apart.