折叱可

Old Korean

Verb

折叱可 (*KEsk-)

1. to snap, to pluck
   • 720, “獻花歌 (Heonhwa-ga)”, in 三國遺事 (Samguk Yusa):

     花肸折叱可獻乎理音如

     *KWOC-hur KEsk-a PAT-wo-li-m(s)-ta

     I shall fittingly pluck a flower and offer it.

Reconstruction notes

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 折叱可, the first character shows that this is the native Old Korean word for “to pluck”, and the subsequent character(s) show(s) that the final syllable of this word is *-ska. Because the semantics and the final phoneme(s) match, the word is conventionally reconstructed as *KEsk-a, the ancestor of Middle Korean 거ᇧ다〮 (Yale: kèsk-tá). Note that the reconstruction was not necessarily the actual pronunciation. Rather, it should simply be considered as a method of representing an Old Korean form phonetically by using its Middle Korean reflex.

According to scholarly convention, the elements of the reconstruction which are not directly represented by phonograms are given in capital letters. This allows readers to identify what part of the reconstruction is attested and what part is applied retroactively from the Middle Korean reflex.

Descendants

• Middle Korean: 거ᇧ다〮 (kèsktá)
  • Korean: 꺾다 (kkeokkta)

References

• 박지용 外 (Park Ji-yong et al.) (2012) 향가 해독 자료집, Seoul National University, page 18
• 남풍현 (Nam Pung-hyeon) (2010) “獻花歌의 解讀”, in Gugyeol Yeon'gu, volume 24, pages 5–35