Sheer Relief

I have a rather bizarre admission. My favorite bathroom reading is the copy of Mongolian Grammar I recently purchased. It’s complex but not complicated, and answers all the little nit-picky questions I have about concessive adverbials, false morphological homonyms, person-bound terminating suffixes – you know, regular guy stuff. I like it so much that it often extends my sessions much longer than truly necessary.

Anyway, during this morning’s appointment, my goal was to sort out once and for all a particular use of “for.” Later in the day I was going to present a new card reader to Erdenebat for his digital camera, and I wanted to say in Mongolian, “This is a gift for you.” I forewent the longer, “This is a gift for you and not a request for reimbursement because it was surprisingly cheap.”

So I beamed in pretty quickly on the section that would answer my query – you guessed it, “Post-positions with Genitive Case Suffixes.” I like the way the book is organized. It has lots of sub-sections with a little explanation, followed by a three-column chart offering English usage in simple sentences, then the Mongolian translation in both Cyrillic and Classical scripts. Perfect.

So there was my little section on p. 287: “тöлöö” = “for…”

First, I looked at the Mongolian sentence, since “tölöö” was kind of new for me. It read, “Есüс бидний тöлöö нас барсан” (Esüs bidnii tölöö nas barsan). I really only knew two of the words, so I glanced to the English column, and promptly had to steady myself from pitching off the throne.

It translated as: “Jesus died for us.”

Just let that sink in for a second.

And now imagine the converse. Pretend I’ve been hired by the Kansas Board of Education to compose an English grammar textbook. I proudly present to them my manuscript for review. And right in the middle of the Dick and Jane and prepositional phrases and dangling participles and such, I slip this bad boy into the section on passive voice:

“The non-existence of God was taught by the Buddha.”

Can you picture the pandemonium? I can, and it’s making me giggle a little. You know that the committee members would be beating each other back to be the first to light the shredded pages right in the middle of the conference table.

Man, there’s still a lot of work to do in this country.

But I can easily forgive that little nugget (very Christian of me, I know), because it’s balanced by other wonderful sections such as “Interjections of Husbandry.” Under the sub-section “Interjections of Miscellaneous Usage,” we learn that herders will sometimes shout, “Sheer! Sheer!” at their charges. This, we are informed, is “used to cause camels to urinate.”

Comments

[Carol]

*snork* Too funny.

[Ryan]

In my world, "sheer," or "shear," as it were, causes sheep to lose their fleece.

In my bathroom I have a Mensa brain-teaser book. I couldn't do even one of the puzzles if my life depended on it, but it keeps me occupied for, er, as long as needed, and fools people into treating me with unearned respect.

[Ariel]

Yeah, that's a great book, and I found it very useful in my Peace Corps time out there. Although wqhen I bought it our here back in October -- at a Smithsonian-Mongolia event in DC -- the Mongolia Society was selling it for like $50!! So hold on to that cherished khel zuin nom. Tani tolo ashigtai bolno yum! And if it's now made it to "all the pages were photocpied front and back, plus the covers, so a third party could make even more money of it" you know it's a winner among the ex-pat community...

[Anne Trumbore]

Damn. I could have used those sentences for my grammar course, but I finished the chapter on prepositions last month. Can you shoot me any good ones about predicate nominative pronouns when you have the chance?

[Robert]

I'm happy to see your study of Mongolian is progressing. I'm about to start studying Bahasa Indonesia. It is supposed to be 'easy'. I couldn't figure out what those terms for types of words mean if my life depended on it.

[Carol]

If Mongolian is like Turkish, you can say 'for' by using a separate word, or you can use the case that indicates 'to' or 'for'. I don't have my Mong. Gram. handy, so I forget if it's instrumentive or what. So you put the 'you' into that case, and it becomes 'for you'. In Turkish, first way is more for indicating a purpose for a thing. 'I bought this book for, or in order to, learn Mongolian'. The second is more to indicate of an object moving toward a person or place. 'I'm giving this to you'. Ask your tutor.

Hey, can you find out the classical, or modern Mongolian word for 'lotus' for me? I have a word in my manuscript, it starts with an L, which means it's a foreign word. By default I'm guessing it's lotus, but I can't puzzle it out.

[Vedran]

For each answer we get in life, tide of new questions arises! Why would someone want to encourage camels to pee...Why doo they need to be encouraged? Why? Why?

[Christian]

Another example:

Evolution is just a theory.

What a minute! This is found in some... US science textbooks!

Man, there’s still a lot of work to do in that country too;-)

[Dolgor]

Toloo-

If you know the word tolooloh- it mean to represent. Therefore the meaning of this word is closer to: on behalf of, for the sake of or in order to. So "for" will definitely change depending on the circumstance. Keep it up, Konchog!