I feel like talking about the verb 지다 today. 지다 has quite a lot of meanings, and I don’t know which 지다 was the first-born, but today, we’re talking about this 지다:
- 요즘 이마에 주름이 져서 속상하다… (I’m upset because wrinkles have formed on my forehead these days…)
Here, 지다 means “to form.”
- 해가 졌어요. (The sun has set.)
Here, 지다 means that a certain natural phenomenon occurs. The boundary is blurry, but it overlaps slightly with the meaning of “to form.” And when the sun sets, what does it look like? It looks like it falls to a lower place, right? So I think that’s how it developed this additional sense of downward direction.
- 꽃이 졌어요. (The flowers have withered / fallen.)
It doesn’t mean the flower dried up ugly and changed color. It refers to the petals falling off, or that state before the flower turns into fruit when it loses its strength.
If you understand the fundamental meaning of 지다 as natural phenomena occurring, along with the image of the setting sun moving downward, it will really help you learn the various meanings of 지다 in the future.
In the past, Korea grew as an agricultural society, so culture inevitably shaped the language. That’s why in so many Korean sentences, there is no grammatical object. In the distant past, how could humans make rain? We just had to surrender to nature. Because of this, there are verbs that learners find almost impossible to grasp, and I think 지다 is one of them.
Anyway, think of 지다 as a verb that helps describe a state itself, and let’s look at these words:
- 값 (price) + 지다 = 값지다 (expensive, valuable)
- 기름 (oil) + 지다 = 기름지다 (greasy, oily)
- 네모 (square) + 지다 = 네모지다 (square-shaped, quadrilateral)
- 경사 (slant, slope) + 지다 = 경사지다 (slant, tilt, sloped, inclined)
- 멋 (charm, flavor) + 지다 = 멋지다 (wonderful, nice, cool, great, fabulous, fashionable, stylish…)