不冬

The basic negating root of the Old Korean negatives is disputed. Because all conventional reconstructions begin with *ant-, many South Korean linguists, including Lee Seung-jae, have proposed that the base form was *anto-, producing 不冬 (*ANtol), 不只 (*ANTOk), and (via deletion of the minimal vowel <o>) 不知 (*ANti). Other scholars, including both Koreans and Alexander Vovin, have argued that the negative root is *an and that *tol, *tok, and *ti are as of yet poorly understood suffixes. Vovin notes that likely borrowings in Tungusic appear to suggest that the root was *an-.

• 非冬 (*ANtol) (different logogram, gugyeol variant depending on Chinese original text)
• 不等 (*ANtoL)

The second character is a common Old Korean phonogram for the syllable *tol. The first syllable is a logogram conventionally reconstructed as *AN because the sequence 不冬 is used in fourteenth-century Idu to write the Middle Korean negator 아니 (Yale: ani), and the Middle Korean Idu tradition preserves many elements of Old Korean orthography. There is also direct phonogramic evidence that the negating noun 不知 was read as *ANti, and the cross-linguistic unlikelihood of having entirely separate roots for verbal and nominal negation is another, if circumstantial, point of evidence for reconstructing the logogram as *AN.

不冬 (*ANtol)

1. not (negates a verb)
   • c. 965, 均如 (Gyunyeo), “恒順衆生歌 (Hangsunjungsaeng-ga)”, in 均如傳 (Gyunyeo-jeon) [Works of Gyunyeo]:

     不冬萎玉內乎留叱等耶

     *ANtol Iwunowonilostaya

     therefore it withers not

   • c. 1170, Interpretive gugyeol glosses to the Avatamsaka Sutra, vol. 35:

     捨^乎尸不^冬乎尸丁

     *SA-ho-l ANtol ho-l-tye

     One will not discard

     (N.B. Gugyeol glyphs are given in non-abbreviated forms.)

• 不知 (*ANti) (nominal negator)
• 毛冬 (*mwotol) (marker of inability)
• 不只 (*ANTOk) (marker of inability)

Like Middle and Modern Korean (see 안 (an) and 않다 (anta)), Old Korean had two forms of verbal negation: a short form, in which the negating adverb 不冬 simply precedes the main verb, and a long form, in which 不冬 negates the verb 乎 (*ho-, “to do”) similar to English do-support. In Middle and Modern Korean, the short form negates only the verb, while the long form negates the entire clause to which the verb belongs. Currently discovered data is insufficient to say whether this was also true of Old Korean.

The Old Korean long-form negation was different from the Middle Korean form. In Old Korean, it took the following form *-l ANtol ho, as seen in the following hypothetical example with the verb 慕理 (*KUli-, “to long for”):

• 慕理尸不冬乎如

  *KUli-l ANtol ho-ta

  to not long for

As 尸 (*-l) was a nominalizer, the Old Korean long form did not involve a main and an auxiliary verb. Rather, the only verb in the construction was the negated 乎 (“to do”), which had the derived noun 慕理尸 (“longing”) as its direct object.

In Middle Korean, it usually took the form -ti ani ho-. As -ti was a verbal suffix and not a nominalizer, the Middle Korean form involved a genuine auxiliary verb.

• 그리디 아니 ᄒᆞ다

  kuli-ti ani ho-ta

  to not long for

In Modern Korean, 아니 ᄒᆞ다 (Yale: ani hota) has merged into the single auxiliary 않다 (anta):

• 그리지 않다

  geuriji anta

  to not long for

• 이용 (Yi Yong) (2003) , “釋讀口訣에 나타난 不定詞의 機能에 대하여 [On the functions of the negative particles in interpretive gugyeol]”, in Gugyeol Yeon'gu, volume 11, pages 249–273