Caveat: 하늘이 돈잎만 하다

하늘이       돈잎만     하다
heaven-SUBJ coin-ONLY do
Heaven is only a coin.
This is about the gloomy person who can’t see how wide or beautiful the world is. I am that person, sometimes. I suppose a slight variant of this in English would the description of someone having “tunnel vision.” The sky narrows down to just a circle – a coin.
I had trouble with the word 돈잎 [don-ip] – it doesn’t appear in any dictionary, although I could guess the meaning (from 돈 meaning money and 잎 meaning leaf, hence “leaf of money” i.e. “coin”).
I messed around with the online dictionary for a while, and finally found a variant spelling 돈닢 [don-nip] (which is a logical alternate spelling if you know the weird spelling rules developed for syllables starting with vowels as a result of historical changes in the pronunciation of words). But even then, 돈닢 only appears in the Korean-Korean dictionary, not in the Korean-English dictionary. I think the quality of Korean-English dictionaries is very poor, online or off.

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