The following is from a scholarly book describing old Jerusalem in the context of the modern geo-political world. The bolded part stands out for me.
市街は、古い巨大な城壁にかこまれています。城壁は[方千]{ほうせん}メートルたらず。 市街の家々は大部分が白っぽい石づくりの、窓の小さい、暗い建物で、そのあいだをせまい石だたみのみちが、迷路のように走っています。(furigana is my addition, not in the original text.)
The meaning seems clear.
The city is surrounded by a massive old castle wall. The walls do not extend more than a thousand meters on a side. The city's houses are dark buildings with small windows built out of white masonry. Between [the houses] run narrow, labyrinthine streets paved in stone.
What stands out are these two points:
- this usage of 方 is novel to me
- the text is generally written in formal style, but this sentence just ends in ず
My questions are as follows:
Is my reading (読みかた) of [方]{ほう} correct?
I'm parsing the meaning as on a side. That seems reasonable. But is it correct? I'm not finding example sentences of this sort of usage in my dictionaries. (An alternative gloss might be as a measure of area, but then the units shouldn't merely be meters, but meters squared. Also, in that case, I'd expect to see 平方, which would have looked strange preceding the number, but I'd have just moved on. Coincidentally(?) the area of the old city is around 1000 square meters. So, looking at the facts of the matter isn't helping distinguish between these two glosses.)
Finally, what's going on with たらず? Why didn't author/editor go with something like たりません? Why is there this change in style? Or, is this simply an example of a cleft sentence? (I'm not used to seeing cleft sentences in published scholarly works.)
