Mongolian and Indo-European language similarities

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   One similarity may be the personal pronoun verb conjugation system.

As an example, let us see how the Mongolian verb “barakh” (to finish), which is written in old Mongolian writing “baraqu” (root “bara-”), conjugates when combined with personal pronouns in the present tense, like it is normally done in Buryat Mongolian. By the way, I am looking at basic structures. I am aware that Mongolian was more complex in the past with gender differentiation in conjugation et cetera. But I think that can be ignored for the purposes of my analysis and comparison here.

Ancient Mongolian “baraqu” – to finish

First person singular: baram (i am finishing)

Second person singular: barasi (you are finishing)

Third person singular: barat (he is finishing)

First person plural: baramus (we are finishing)

Second person plural: barata (you, sir, are finishing/you guys are finishing)

Third person plural: barad (they are finishing)

Proto-Indo-European “ber” – to carry

First person singular: Berom

Second person singular: Beresi

Third person singular: Bereti

First person plural: Beromos

Second person plural: Berete

Third person plural: Berond

It is amazing how the Proto-Indo-European conjugation is closest in a way to Latin. If you analyze the Mongolian, it is clear that personal pronouns have been added as a suffix to the verb root, although in a shortened form. The “pronoun-suffixes” are (in full elaborated form) “mi, si, ter, mus (short form of manus, meaning “we”, it is preserved in Manchu “mus”), ta, ted” respectively. This system is still present in many Mongolian languages today, like Buryat and Moghol. In Buryat, the equivalents would be “baranam, baranash, barana, baranamdi, baranat, baranad”, which are very similar despite trifling divergences. This system is no longer used in Khalkha Mongolian, because the verb system is more simplified in Khalkha Mongolian. One thing to note would be the first person plural "baranamdi" in Buryat, here the pronoun-suffix is "bid", another form of "we", which is simply the plural of "bi" (me), also written "biz" in Turkish. In this case the shortened form of "bid" is "-mdi", which might also be written "-miz" based on the obviously identical Turkish pronoun. This might in turn easily be read as "-mus" which brings us full circle back to the "baramus" (we are finishing) of the original example mentioned above. The reason for this similarity is that the root of "-mus" and "-mdi" is the same, namely "mi/bi" meaning "me", which when converted into the plural "we" becomes "manus/mus" and "bid/mid/biz/miz" respectively.

Another similarity would be the interrogative pronouns. For example, in Hindi, “kahan” means “where” and “kitan” means “how many”.In Spanish “quien” means “who”. In Mongolian, “kahan” means “where”, “keden” means “how many” and “ken” means “who”.

In some ways I think Mongolian is like an Indo-European language spoken in reverse. In Mongolian the suffix “-d” is similar to the Indo-European particle “to”, it shows destination, but the only difference is that in the case of Mongolian the partice comes AFTER the word, which is the reverse of Indo-European. Also, the Mongolian suffix “-aas” (written -acha) is similar to the Indo-European particles “aus” (German), “hacha” (Persian) and “-sa” (Hindi), it means that something is coming out of something. Again, in Mongolian the particle comes AFTER the word, although in the exceptional case of Hindi, "-sa" is a suffix.

So for example, while a Mongolian says “kahanaas iresi?” (from where are you coming?), an Indo-European might say something like “kahansa beresi?” (from where are you carrying ‘that thing’?) In this case the Indo-European example is closest to Hindi, which unlike other Indo-European languages uses many suffixes, like Mongolian.

I don’t know about other so-called Altaic languages like Japanese, but Mongolian seems a bit similar to Indo-European.