Talk:-지

Etym 3 + 4 seem awful similar

@Wyang, TAKASUGI Shinji, 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.

	Assertive marker -지 (Etymology 3)	Negation marker -지 (Etymology 4)
Class	Sentence-final	Conjunctive Always followed by 않다, 못하다 or 말다
Register	Colloquial Informal non-polite (해체)	Literary (-지 않다, -지 못하다) No register (-지 말다)
Polite form	쉽죠?	쉽지 않아요. *쉽죠 않아요. (ungrammatical)
After 이다	학생이지?	*학생이지 않다. (ungrammatical) 학생이 아니다.
Contraction with -하다	생각하지? *생각지? (ungrammatical)	생각하지 않다. 생각지 않다.
	원하지? *원치? (ungrammatical)	원하지 않다. 원치 않다.

@HappyMidnight, KoreanQuoter: what do you think? — TAKASUGI 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:

	Assertive marker -지 (Etymology 3)	Negation marker -지 (Etymology 4)
-겠-	하겠지?	*하겠지 않다 (ungrammatical) 하지 않겠다
-ㄹ 거다	할 거지?	*할 거지 않다 (ungrammatical) 하지 않을 거다

— TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 22:15, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

• Dictionaries like to keep them apart: e.g. 지²⁴ and 지²³ in the Standard Korean Language Dictionary.
• 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.]

1. (sentence-final or followed by yo) CASUAL statement, question, suggestion or command (often inviting confirmation or agreement);
2. used within a complex sentence as a loose connective;
3. -ci (yo) man (un);
4. used with auxiliaries anh.ta (ani hata), mōs hata, and mālta to negativize.

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