On Mongolian
A Westerner’s first impression of the language
The prose-writer is a wanderer in this world, and my wanderlust has taken me to the Mongolian language (монгол хэл). Due to my love of languages, it was very easy for me to fall in love with Mongolian; I even learned to sing the beautiful Buryat folk song “Altargana” which I have been doing every day so far (“Chinggis Khaanii Magtaal” is next!)
However, learning to actually speak Mongolian is proving to be rather difficult. I don’t experience this much of a learning curve when I study European languages, which makes sense because the majority of them are related by a common ancestor language (Proto-Indo-European).
If you speak a European language (yes, that most certainly includes English), there are certain grammar rules you can expect when studying languages within the same family (word order, the use of prepositions, a negating adverb, subordinate clauses, etc.). But when it comes to studying a language like Mongolian, which is outside this realm of European linguistic familiarity, it’s very easy to get confused and maybe a bit overwhelmed.
Just to give you a taste of what I was in for, let’s pick apart a pretty basic yet important sentence.
Example Sentence #1
The sentence I start with here is my go-to sentence when breaking into a new language. It would most certainly be the most applicable if I were ever in a situation that required knowledge of that language. Here it is:
“I don’t speak Mongolian.”
Simple enough? But let’s see that in Mongolian:
Би монголоор ярьдаггүй.
Bi mongoloor jar’daggüj.
Whoa. Let’s go through this word-for-word:
Bi
This word just means “I,” the first-person subject pronoun. Okay, so far, so good. This might not be so hard after all!
Mongoloor
Spoke too soon. As you may have already assumed, this is the word for “Mongolian,” but not exactly the way we use it in English. Perhaps you’ve noticed that this word ends in -oor. This denotes that the word “Mongolian” is being used in the instrumental case, meaning that in our sentence, this word is being used as some kind of utility to the verb — in this case, “speak.”
So we can easily translate mongoloor into “in Mongolian.” That -oor ending acts the same way as “in (a language)” works in English. In this context, think of the word mongoloor as a tool (or instrument, if you will), one that you need to “speak” with in order to convey your thoughts. Okay, next word:
Jar’daggüj
Oh boy.
So the basic form of this verb, if you were to look it up in the dictionary, would be jarikh (pr. “yahr-iKH”) which means “to speak.” You can even see the jar’ part at the beginning of the word bolded above. So we got our “speak,” so what’s the rest?
The dag part (pr. “dahg”) is called a habitual suffix. This just denotes that the subject of the sentence is doing the verb regularly. Speaking is certainly done regularly, even if you don’t speak Mongolian, so that suffix definitely has its application here. English speakers could think of this as your generic present tense.
And lastly, güj (pr. “goo-i”) is a negation suffix meaning “not,” finally giving us jar’daggüj, which means, “[I] do not speak.”
So “I in Mongolian speak-not” is how it’s said in Mongolian if I were to retain the word order. Sounds strange to us, but to the Mongolian ear, it’s just as it should be!
Example Sentence #2
Here’s another pretty useful sentence that will give us more insight on the grammar:
“I’m trying to learn Mongolian.”
Би монгол хэл сурах гэж хичээж байна.
Bi mongol khel surakh gezh khicheezh bayna.
Let’s make this look less impossible:
Bi
We already know this one, “I.” Making progress!
Mongol khel
This literally means “the Mongolian language.” I guess to make it more clear that we are talking about the language specifically.
Surakh
This means “to learn.” It’s the infinitive of the verb, meaning it’s a form of the verb not specific to a subject. This is the form of the verb you would see if you looked it up in the dictionary.
Gezh
This is a particle indicating purpose. A particle is a word with no one-to-one translatable meaning on its own but modifies how we understand the word it is applied to. In this case, surakh is receiving this particle of purpose, so we can understand surakh gezh as “to learn” (i.e. “for the purpose of learning”).
Khicheej Baina
This is a present progressive construction. It means that this verb is presently happening right now, as opposed to a normal present tense, which demonstrates habitual or regular action. Therefore, this means “[I] am trying,” implying that the attempt at learning Mongolian is a continuous effort.
Hopefully, this will help you gain another inch into a conversation should you ever speak to a Mongolian!
Reflections
I find Mongolian to be rather challenging. Where we would use prepositions and adverbs, Mongolian seems to favor suffixes to get the same meaning across. It also seems that the verb always goes to the end of a Mongolian sentence — which reminds me of most other Asian languages, Hindi, or even Latin. Those seem to be the biggest differences in structure so far, but we do see familiar concepts like a case system.
While Mongolian words are completely different from European ones, I will say that the case system (subject, object, indirect object, possessive, etc.) is pretty similar in essence to European languages; this kind of morphology would be very familiar to German, Greek, Icelandic, or East Slavic speakers — especially Slavic because they still use the instrumental case as demonstrated in the first sentence example.
Also, if you speak or study Japanese, Korean, or a Turkic language, this word order and usage of particles and suffixes should look very familiar to you, and I’m sure you would be able to pick this up a lot quicker than others.
I hope you learned something new and interesting! It’s a big fascinating world out there, and I am actually very thankful I’ll never live long enough to learn it all — life would be so boring without having these little adventures to look forward to. So don’t forget to have some of your own, and maybe one day you’ll be like me, talking to yourself on Medium as well!
