How a Mongolian Word Is Built

Agglutinative, and what that costs you

Mongolian is an agglutinative language. The word means what it sounds like: pieces are glued on, one after another, behind an unchanging stem. Nothing fuses, nothing is replaced, and the stem does not shift its shape to signal anything the way English sing shifts to sang. You start with a stem and you append.

The smallest possible demonstration is the verb to be. The stem is бай–; the present-future suffix is –на; together they give байна. Nothing else happened. Add instead the polite imperative and you get байгаарай (do be, please be). The stem is still visibly бай– in both.

For an English speaker the cost of this system is not the gluing but the length. English spreads grammatical information across small separate words placed in front of the content word: with my parents is three words, and the information arrives before you reach the noun. Mongolian puts the same information behind the noun, inside one word, and you reach it last. Reading Mongolian therefore means reading the end of a word first and then going back for the meaning — which is the opposite of the habit you already have.

The stem never moves, and that is the good news

Set against the length, there is a large compensation, and it is worth stating plainly because beginners rarely notice it in the first weeks. The stem does not change. English hides a great deal of grammar inside its words — take, took, taken; foot, feet; child, children — and an English learner has to memorise each irregularity one word at a time, because no rule predicts them. Mongolian puts essentially nothing inside the word. ав– is ав– in every one of its forms, and there is no list of irregular verbs to learn.

What you pay for that instead is the three spelling adjustments further down this page, and they are adjustments at the joint between stem and suffix, not changes to the stem's identity. A dozen of them cover nearly everything you will meet, which is a much smaller bill than a few hundred irregular English verbs.

Reading a long word: stem at the front, suffixes from the back

The method's showpiece is найруулагчдаас (from the directors), which it cuts into six pieces. You do not need to reconstruct the word's full history to read it; you need to recognise the last few pieces and the stem at the front:

• –аас at the very end is the ablative — this is a from;
• –д before it is the plural — so it is from more than one;
• –гч before that turns a verb into the person who does it — so these are agents;
• and найруул– at the front is the stem, itself built out of two older pieces, which is how the method arrives at six.

Work from the right-hand end and the word gives itself up in four seconds. Work from the left and you will be hunting through a dictionary for a twelve-letter entry that does not exist. The same technique handles танайхан (your household, your people), which the method cuts into three: та, the polite you, plus –най, plus –хан. Change the first piece and you get манайхан (our household, our people).

Suffixes stack, and the last one is the one that matters

Suffixes do not replace each other. They queue. Each new one attaches behind everything built so far, and the word simply grows:

• найз (friend)
• найз нар (the friends)
• найз нартай (with the friends)
• найз нартайгаа (with my friends)

And on a two-word stem, эцэг эх (father and mother, parents) gives эцэг эхтэй and then эцэг эхтэйгээ (with my parents).

The practical point for a reader is that the final suffix is the one that tells you what the word is doing in the sentence. Everything before it describes the thing; the last piece says how the thing is involved. The sequence itself is fixed and never varies, and because that order is worth a page of its own it has one: the order in which suffixes stack.

A group of words takes one ending, at the end

When two or more words form a single unit, only the last one is inflected. The ending applies to the whole group:

• онгоцны буудал (airport) gives онгоцны буудлаас (from the airport);
• зочид буудал (hotel) gives зочид буудалд (at the hotel);
• их сургууль (university) gives их сургуулиас (from the university);
• галт тэрэг (train) gives галт тэргээр (by train).

This is more comfortable than it looks, because English does the same with its prepositions: from the airport marks the phrase once, not every word in it. The difference is only which end carries the mark.

The three spelling adjustments

Here is where beginners lose confidence, and it is nearly always the same three things. A suffix is added exactly as the tables give it, but the joint between stem and suffix is tidied up, and the result does not look like the sum of its parts. None of this is vowel harmony; the vowel of the suffix is whatever harmony already decided.

A linking consonant after a long vowel

A stem ending in a long vowel or a diphthong cannot simply be followed by a suffix beginning with a vowel, so a consonant is inserted. The ablative inserts н; the instrumental inserts г.

• хөдөө (the countryside) gives хөдөөнөөс (from the countryside) but хөдөөгөөр (around the countryside);
• такси gives таксигаар (by taxi);
• юу (what) gives юугаар (by what means);
• ой (forest) gives ойгоор (through the forest).

A short vowel that drops out

When a word's last syllable has a short vowel, that vowel often disappears before a suffix. The syllable collapses and the word gets shorter instead of longer, which is exactly the opposite of what you expect from an agglutinative language and is the single most common reason a learner cannot find a word in the dictionary.

• өчигдөр (yesterday) gives өчигдрөөс (since yesterday) — the second ө is gone;
• өнөөдөр (today) gives өнөөдрийн сонин (today's newspaper);
• галт тэрэг gives галт тэргээр — the second э of тэрэг is gone;
• зочид буудал gives зочид буудлаас;
• цайны газар (canteen, tea house) gives цайны газраас;
• торго (silk) gives торгоор (in silk), where the final short vowel is swallowed by the suffix.

The rescue move when you meet an unfamiliar word is therefore: strip the suffix, and if what is left is not a word, try putting a short vowel back into the last syllable.

A linking vowel before –д

A sizeable group of nouns does not take the dative-locative ending directly. A vowel is inserted first, and sometimes an н with it. The inserted vowel follows the harmony of the word, so it is not a new choice to make, but whether a given word inserts one has to be learnt word by word.

Which of the two endings –д and –т a word takes in the first place is a different question, and it belongs to the decision tree for case endings.

The same machinery makes new words

Everything above concerns suffixes that say how a word is used in a sentence. Mongolian uses the identical gluing technique to build new vocabulary, and once you can see the joins your reading vocabulary grows without your learning anything new.

• –ч and –чин make the person who deals in something: эм (medicine) gives эмч (doctor); мал (livestock) gives малчин (herder).
• –гч makes the person or thing that performs a verb: ажилл– (to work) gives ажиллагч (the one who works); найруул– gives найруулагч (a director, the one who stages a thing).
• –тай makes an adjective out of having something: зав (free time) gives завтай (free, not busy); салхи (wind) gives салхитай (windy); аюул (danger) gives аюултай (dangerous); амт (taste) gives амттай (tasty).
• –гүй makes the opposite adjective, out of not having it: салхигүй (windless), завгүй (busy), сүүгүй (without milk).

That last pair is the most productive thing on this page. Any noun plus –тай or –гүй gives you an adjective and its negative, and English has no single device that does the same job across the board.

Compounding works too, and Mongolian compounds are often two plain words whose combination has to be learnt as a unit: онгоц (aircraft) and буудал (stop, station) make онгоцны буудал (airport); гэр бүл (family); хүн ам (population); цаг агаар (weather); ард түмэн (the people); их сургууль (university, literally the big school).

What is not decided here

Which vowel a suffix wears is a separate question from whether it attaches, and it is settled by harmony: the rule, the table of four-form suffixes and the exceptions. What each case ending actually means belongs to the family of pages on the seven cases. And the reflexive ending you saw in найз нартайгаа has a page of its own, the reflexive possessive, because English has nothing that corresponds to it.