two subjects in 당신은 이름이 뭐예요?

Question

I have just studied Korean for a short time. I am having problem with the sentence below. 당신은 이름이 뭐예요? = What is your name? My friend told me that there are two subjects in that sentence (당신 marked by 은 and 이름 marked by 이). I am confused now. Should it have only one subject, your name? Also which is the Korean equivalent word of "your" in that sentence?

Answer 1

I'd like to add a bit to what the other tutor said. While there is a distinction between subject and object (or topic and subject), the issue at hand is actually a little different. If you were to directly translate this into English it would say something like "What is are you name?" because "당신" means "You" and "은" just identifies it as the subject(topic, as the other tutor put it). The more accurate sentence is: 당신의 이름이 뭐에요?

The 의 instead of은 changes the word from "You" to "Your", making the word "name" she only subject, which is grammatically correct. I hope that helps!

Answer 2

I see this questions come up often with self learners.

I'll explain this as simple as I can since this is something I usually cover in a lesson.

Korean has what is called a particle. This is comparable to the article system (a, an, the) in English. Particles mark the topic, subject, object, etc.

The 은 after 당신 is a topic particle.

The 이 after 이름 is a subject particle.

The subject of the sentence is name but the topic is 당신 or you. The topic is interchangeable with other nouns.