Grammatical Blank: 있이
In English, without is translated as 없이 in Korean. Then what about with? Would that be 있이? Strangely enough, Korean has no such word.
The word 없다 (“not to exist”) seems to have undergone a rather unusual process of formation. In many languages, non-existence is expressed simply as the negation of existence, as in “not exist.” By contrast, Korean, along with several other Northeast Asian languages, employs a separate word, 없다, which is grammatically classified as an adjectival form of existential negation. While there is no evidence that Koreans historically perceived non-existence more sharply than other peoples, this lexical structure does suggest a trace of treating absence as an independent entity.
Setting aside the fact that 없다 exists as a distinct word, why then does 있이 remain only a grammatical blank? One hypothesis is that 있다 (“to exist”) was received by the speech community as a self-evident, full state of being, such that no derivative form was needed. Absence, by contrast, required explicit naming, and thus solidified as an independent word. Yet this is far from self-evident, and we can only speculate as to the cause.
This leads to another question. How, then, is with actually translated into Korean?
Accompaniment → with friends → “친구와 함께” / “친구랑”
Instrument or means → with a knife → “칼로”
Feature or state → with blue eyes → “파란 눈을 가진”
Condition or circumstance → with time → “시간이 지나면서” / “시간이 있다면”
In other words, Korean does not translate with as a single word but distributes its functions across particles, adverbs, and attributive forms depending on context. What is striking here is that meaning can be conveyed not by dividing the world into existence versus non-existence, but by specifying the modes of existence. This shows that even when meanings do not perfectly coincide, communication remains possible across different layers of expression. It also evokes, at a religious level, the idea of an original undifferentiated language.