ᄇᆞᄅᆞᆷ

Middle Korean

Pronunciation

• (Morphophonemic) IPA^(key): ⫽pʌ̀lʌ̀m⫽

Etymology 1

Uncertain, though traceable at least as far back as Late Old Korean 孛䌫 (*pòlòm), attested in the Jilin leishi, 1103. Beyond that, the hyangga "Jemangmaega" (祭亡妹歌 / 제망매가), a. 766, features the locative form 風未; while the word for "wind" itself is rendered as the completely opaque semantic character 風 (“wind”), the phonetic spelling 未 (*muy~moy) for the locative marker reveals that the eighth-century Old Korean word for "wind" also had a final *-m.

Some scholars have suggested the term may be an ancient borrowing from Old Chinese 風 (OC *plum, *plums, “wind”), but such a claim cannot be supported beyond superficial phonological correspondences. Alternatively, perhaps originally a verbal construction equivalent to *ᄇᆞᆯ- (*pòl) +‎ -ᄋᆞᆷ (-òm, nominalizer), wherein the first component is an unattested but regular yang-vowel ablaut pair of 블다〮 (pùltá, “to blow (of wind)”). While promising at first glance, this etymology is made slightly less plausible by the scarcity of attestation of 블다〮 (pùltá). Within the Middle Korean corpus, 불다〮 (pwùltá) is by far the more common form; rounding assimilation of weak vowels following bilabial consonants in this position is not typically found until later periods, meaning that 블다〮 (pùltá) may be a misprint or otherwise nontraditional. If that were to be the case, a stem *ᄇᆞᆯ- (*pòl) could not be posited.

Noun

ᄇᆞᄅᆞᆷ (pòlòm)

1. wind, air, draft

Descendants

• Korean: 바람 (baram)

Etymology 2

Noun

ᄇᆞᄅᆞᆷ (pòlòm)

1. wall, enclosure, surrounding