Person marking of finite predicates
In contrast to Buryat and Kalmyk, predicative personal markers are not used in Khalkha.
All finite predicates in Buryat and Kalmyk, including regular nouns used as predicates and participles functioning as finite predicates, can take personal markers, which derive from the enclitically used basic forms of the personal pronouns, e.g., Kalmyk bi bagš-v ‘I am a teacher’, bi jov-na-v ‘I’ll leave’.
With verbs, the morpheme order depends on the presence of particles: personal marking moves to the question particle, some modal, and discourse particles, in Kalmyk also to the negation particle:
| Buryat | stem-tense-neg-pers | oro-bo-güi-b | ‘I did not enter’; |
| stem-tense-(neg) ptcl-pers | ši mede-ne-güi gü-š | ‘Don’t you know?’; | |
| Kalmyk | stem-tense-pers | jov-na-v | ‘I’ll leave’; |
| stem-ptcp neg-pers | jov-sn uga-v jov-sn-go-v | ‘I did not leave’; | |
| stem-tense ptcl-pers | jahad ködlsžä-x-mb-c | ‘Why do you work then?’ |
Table: Predicative personal markers
| Language | Person/number | ||||
| 1 SG | 2 Sg | 3 SG/PL | 1 PL | 2 Pl | |
| Khalkha | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Buryat | -b/-m(bi) | -š/-ši | Ø / -d | -bdi/-di/-mdi | -t/-tA |
| Kalmyk | - v/-m(b) | -č | Ø | -vdn/-dn | -t |
The third person singular and plural in Kalmyk is unmarked; in Buryat the third person plural is marked by the nominal plural suffix -d.
In the first and second persons, the Buryat has also separate variants of markers for vowel stems, consonant, and nasal stems. In the first person singular, the personal endings -bi in Buryat and -v in Kalmyk after nasal stems undergo a morphonological alternation; as a result, there are the new merged markers -m-bi in Buryat and -m-b in Kalmyk. In this case the actual ending elements of the first person singular -bi and -b can be lost in both languages.
Another interesting feature in Buryat is the usage of both predicative and possessive markers with the future participle used as a finite future tense. The combination of the future participle with the predicative personal markers encodes general future, while with the possessive marker it encodes near future with a modal connotation, i.e., inevitability or necessity, e.g.:
| Unša-xa-b | unša-xa-m(ni) |
| Read-pc.fut-1sg | read-pc.fut-poss.1sg |
| ‘I will read’ | ‘I will read (I will have to read soon, for sure)’ |
As mentioned above, predicative personal markers are not used in Khalkha. Only in the precative, i.e., emphatic imperative, the forms of singular and (dialectally) plural contain the element -č and -t, which are traces of the postclitic use of the second person pronouns singular and plural respectively (Janhunen 2012: 153), e.g., ög-öö-č ‘(you=2sg) do give!’ and ög=ööt ‘(you=2pl) do give!’