I found this sentence: “언제 그만 말할까니?”
I was wondering why the structure wasn’t set for “언제 말이 그만할꺼니?“
Would this still work as an alternative?
Appreciate any help. Thank you!
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Shouldn’t the second sentence have 말을 instead of 말이?
With that change, both sentences make sense to me. But the first sentence puts the emphasis 그만, while the second sentence emphasizes 말.
As for 까니 vs. 꺼니 . . . that could be 사투리, or perhaps a typo. We would need a native Korean person to clear that up for us.
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very late reply.
“그만 ~V” is used really often - in representative imperative cases, “그만 해!” = “stop doing that!”; “이제 그만 마시세요…” = “please stop drinking now…” and so on.
As I’m sure you know, word order in Korean is much more flexible than English due to the existence of particles and clear cases and so on.
As for “~까니”… this is an agglutinative combination of two different morphemes, as you guess. ~까 is a question or suppositional morpheme, while ~니 is another question or supposition particle that is used to someone of lower station, like a parent to a child, boss to employee, etc. So “언제 그만 말할까니?” is probably best understood as “when will (you/we) stop talking already??”
~꺼 is different. It’s often used these days as a substitute for “것”, but this is, according to all Korean language authorities, wrong. It’s also often included on lists of “frequently incorrect Korean”.
So someone might conceivably say “언제 말이 그만할꺼니?” which would be a socially higher person talking to one below, and asking a grammatically wrong version of “언제 말을 그만할 것이니?”
Lastly, in your “언제 말이 그만할꺼니?”, ‘말’ takes the subject marker 이, which means it is the thing doing something. So “speech” is “stopping” (something else)? It’s a bit awkward and probably incorrect, if being very strict. (Although Koreans often mix up their particles almost as much as we do.) Since the sentence means for (an implied subject) to stop speaking, 말 probably would need the direct object particle 을/를 - “언제 말을 그만할까니?”
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sorry, don’t know how useful this very late reply (above) is to you, but just saw this post.
This was very useful. Thanks very much.
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