Talk:-지

Etym 3 + 4 seem awful similar
, anyone else active in KO:

How are Etym 3 and 4 different enough to justify keeping these separate? The usage seems awfully similar, and with no actual etymological information to distinguish these, shouldn't these be combined? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 20:57, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, I don’t know how they can be similar synchronically: they have different meanings and different behaviors. I don’t know their etymologies though.
 * {| class="wikitable" style="white-space: nowrap;"

! ! Assertive marker -지 (Etymology 3) ! Negation marker -지 (Etymology 4) ! Class ! Register ! Polite form ! After 이다 ! rowspan="2" | Contraction with -하다
 * Sentence-final
 * Conjunctive Always followed by 않다, 못하다 or 말다
 * Colloquial Informal non-polite (해체)
 * Literary (-지 않다, -지 못하다) No register (-지 말다)
 * 쉽죠?
 * 쉽지 않아요. *쉽죠 않아요. (ungrammatical)
 * 학생이지?
 * *학생이지 않다. (ungrammatical) 학생이 아니다.
 * 생각하지? *생각지? (ungrammatical)
 * 생각하지 않다. 생각지 않다.
 * 원하지? *원치? (ungrammatical)
 * 원하지 않다. 원치 않다.
 * }
 * : what do you think? — T AKASUGI Shinji (talk) 22:18, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't think the meaning is that different -- in both cases, it's vaguely similar to the conjunctive て・ては in Japanese. In the Korean, the negative is only supplied by the following verb.  The imperative comes across almost as a truncated request, like "～て（ください）" where the ください is omitted.  The confirmative parses quite similarly to "～（の）では（ない）？"
 * Looking at your specific examples in the table:
 * Class: Parsed as a conjunctive with following portions omissible, the sentence-final versus negative imperative loosely matches how conjunctive て works in Japanese.
 * Register: Again, similar to final て, which is colloquial as sentence-final in Japanese and itself carries no register in normal conjunctive use (register being expressed instead by the verbs and other parts of the utterance).
 * Polite form: For sentence-final, this appears to be 지 + the ubiquitous (이)요 used to mark the polite register.
 * After 이다: I note that 않다 historically seems to derive from 하다, so the ungrammaticality of the negation example makes sense -- it would parse out less as "(someone) is not a student" (which is the grammatical example without the 지) and more as "(someone) is not being a student" (which is an odd utterance even as English).
 * Contraction with 하다: To me, this is the most interesting divergence in the parallels between the two languages. That said, the sentence-final utterances are only ungrammatical when missing any verb at all.  We could view the negative conjunctive uses without 하- as simple elision of the 하다, since the syntactic verb is supplied by 않다 / 말다 / etc.
 * That's my take on this, anyway. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 15:50, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
 * They may be etymologically related. In that case the negation conjunctive -지 must be older. But it is rather close to the nominal marker -기, as it allows the nominative marker 가 like 그렇지가 않다 and also the topic marker 는 like 그렇지는 않다. It is semantically neutral and has no assertive meaning. There are also other differences:
 * {| class="wikitable" style="white-space: nowrap;"
 * {| class="wikitable" style="white-space: nowrap;"

! ! Assertive marker -지 (Etymology 3) ! Negation marker -지 (Etymology 4) ! -겠- ! -ㄹ 거다
 * 하겠지?
 * *하겠지 않다 (ungrammatical) 하지 않겠다
 * 할 거지?
 * *할 거지 않다 (ungrammatical) 하지 않을 거다
 * }
 * — T AKASUGI Shinji (talk) 22:15, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Dictionaries like to keep them apart: e.g. -지24 and -지23 in the .
 * Etymologically these two are related, both derived from the MK ending -˙ti, attached directly to the verb stem. Structurally it was made up of the bound noun t ‘objective fact’ plus the nominative marker ˙i (Martin, 1995, “On the Prehistory of Korean Grammar: Verb Forms”). There was a complementary formation -˙t ol that incorporated the accusative marker ˙u/ol, but that eventually fell into disuse, and then -˙t i became treated as an ending -t˙i, capable itself of attaching particles, including the nominative and accusative markers, as shown by the modern emphatic negative form with -ci ka/lul anh- (ibid.).
 * Martin (1992), A Reference Grammar of Korean, Part II, pp. 453–455 discussed this ending:
 * -ci < ˙ti (< ˙t i), suspective. [In the first three uses -(ess.)ess.ci and -(ess.)keyss.ci occur.]
 * (sentence-final or followed by yo) CASUAL statement, question, suggestion or command (often inviting confirmation or agreement);
 * used within a complex sentence as a loose connective;
 * -ci (yo) man (un);
 * used with auxiliaries anh.ta (ani hata), mōs hata, and mālta to negativize.


 * Wyang (talk) 11:41, 31 August 2018 (UTC)