邀里白

Old Korean

Alternative forms

• 邀呂白

Verb

邀里白 (*MWOri-SOLPO-)

1. to serve, to wait on
   • c. 965, 均如 (Gyunyeo), “禮敬諸佛歌 (Yegyeongjebul-ga)”, in 均如傳 (Gyunyeo-jeon):

     刹刹每如邀里白乎隱

     *CHAL-CHAL-MAta MWOri-SOLP-wo-n

     which each and every temple serves

Reconstruction notes

This word is attested twice in the hyangga poems of the tenth-century monk Gyunyeo.

In Old Korean orthography, native terms with clear Chinese equivalents are usually written with an initial Chinese character (logogram) glossing the meaning of the word, followed by one or more Chinese characters (phonograms) that transcribe the final syllable or coda consonant of the term. In the case of 邀里白, the first character of this word shows that this is the native Old Korean word for "to wait on", and the second character shows that this word contained the syllable *li/ *ri. The final character is well-established as the common object-honoring auxillary verb 白 (*SOLPO-). Because the semantics and the latter two segments match, the word is conventionally reconstructed as *MWOri-SOLPO-, the ancestor of 뫼〯ᅀᆞᆸ〮다〮 (Yale: mwǒyzóptá, “to serve”).

Middle Korean merged Old Korean *r and *l unconditionally, and it is not always easy to determine the Old Korean phoneme based on the Middle Korean reflex. Old Korean reconstructions are conventionally given in the Yale Romanization of Korean, which makes only those phonemic distinctions also made in Middle Korean. However, Alexander Vovin gives circumstantial evidence that the syllable being transcribed by 里 is *ri with a rhotic consonant.

Descendants

• Middle Korean: 뫼〯ᅀᆞᆸ〮다〮 (mwǒyzóptá)
  • ⇒ Korean: 모시다 (mosida)

References

• 박지용 外 (Park Ji-yong et al.) (2012) 향가 해독 자료집 [hyangga haedok jaryojip, A Sourcebook of Hyangga Interpretations], Seoul National University, page 200
• Alexander Vovin (2020) “Old Korean and Proto-Korean *r and *l Revisited”, in International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics‎^[1], volume 2, pages 94—107