The case system of Middle Mongol has remained mostly intact down to the present, although important changes occurred with the comitative and the dative and most other case suffixes did undergo slight changes in form, i.e., were shortened. The Middle Mongol comitative -"luγ-a" could not be used attributively, but it was replaced by the suffix -"taj" that originally derived adjectives denoting possession from nouns, e.g. "mori-tai" 'having a horse' became "mor'toj" 'having a horse/with a horse'. As this adjective functioned parallel to "ügej" 'not having', it has been suggested that a "privative case" ('without') has been introduced into Mongolian. There have been three different case suffixes in the dative-locative-directive domain that are grouped in different ways: -"a" as locative and -"dur", -"da" as dative or -"da" and -"a" as dative and -"dur" as locative, in both cases with some functional overlapping. As -"dur" seems to be grammaticalized from "dotur-a" 'within', thus indicating a span of time, the second account seems to be more likely. Of these, -"da" was lost, -"dur" was first reduced to -"du" and then to -"d" and -"a" only survived in a few frozen environments. Finally, the directive of modern Mongolian, -"ruu", has been innovated from "uruγu" 'downwards'. Social gender agreement was abandoned.