Estonian to Mongolian Cyrillic: keep past events separate from how they became known
A reported event is not automatically a distant event
Estonian quotative forms can signal that a statement comes from another source. Christoph Unger’s analysis describes the -vat form as lacking person and number inflection, and discusses contrasts between indicative and quotative wording within reported discourse. This means that a report about somebody’s journey contains two potentially separate questions: when the journey happened and how the present speaker obtained the information.
When translating into Mongolian, do not use an Estonian reporting form as a shortcut for “long ago.” Conversely, an indicative source sentence need not imply that the writer personally witnessed the event. Unger examines contexts in which attribution and the representation of another person’s thought matter, rather than reducing the distinction to a calendar category. If a message first names the person who supplied the news, retain that connection when assessing the target sentence’s past form; a fluent arrival report can otherwise acquire an unintended eyewitness claim.
Mongolian has more than an eyewitness versus hearsay switch
Benjamin Brosig’s study of spoken Khalkha distinguishes established knowledge, represented by -sang in his analytical notation, from newly accessed direct or indirect information. The latter distinction involves -laa and -jee. Importantly, already established information need not have originated in personal observation. An Estonian account of a familiar family event therefore does not require an explicitly indirect target form merely because somebody originally told the writer about it.
The research also describes later realization and vivid recollection, which complicate a mechanical “heard it versus saw it” conversion. These are useful questions when Estonian narrators discover what happened after seeing its result, or retell an event they vividly remember. Brosig explicitly limits his central analysis to spoken Khalkha and distinguishes it from formal written genres. A newspaper report and a personal message should not be forced into one invariant suffix rule. His notation labels grammatical categories; it is not a spelling instruction to append the same Latin letters to every Cyrillic verb.
Questions have their own established forms
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies illustrates the common past question Чи хоол идсэн үү?, asking whether somebody has eaten. It presents -сан and the corresponding question pattern as widely used past constructions. For an Estonian enquiry about a completed meal, a reader should therefore not treat this form as evidence that the speaker already knows the answer or personally observed the eating.
The same teaching module gives Бид өчигдөр хөдөөнөөс ирсэн, a statement about arriving from the countryside yesterday. Its time expression and past predicate work together. An Estonian source can likewise specify a date without specifying its evidence source, so preserve the date while evaluating the Mongolian predicate in context. The module separately lists past question and negative patterns: turning a statement into a question is not simply a matter of preserving its ending and adding punctuation. This matters particularly when translating an Estonian follow-up that requests confirmation rather than announces new information.
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