汀理

Old Korean

Noun

汀理 ([?]-li or [?]-ri)

1. (hapax) riverbank
   • c. 740, 忠談師 (Chungdamsa), “讚耆婆郞歌 (Changiparang-ga)”, in 三國遺事 (Samguk Yusa) [Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms]:

     沙是八陵隱汀理也中 / 耆郞矣皃史是史藪邪

     By the riverbank where the sand is split / Ah, the thicket that is indeed the old knight's visage.

     (The verse is unclear; the translation is based on Kim Wan-jin's tentative interpretation.)

Reconstruction notes

Per Old Korean orthography, the final syllable was *-li or *-ri. Due to a lack of Middle or Modern Korean reflex, the rest of the pronunciation is not reconstructible. The Middle Korean word for "riverbank" was the periphrastic 믌ᄀᆞᇫ (mul-s koz, literally “edge of the water”) > Modern 물가 (mulga), which seems to have displaced the Old Korean word.

In order to allow some sort of transcription of Old Korean, Korean scholars in the past century have proposed:

• A connection to Middle Korean 나리 (nali, “stream”), which is now generally rejected both on semantic grounds and because the very same poem actually contains the word 川理 (*NAli, “stream”).
• Various solutions employing cranberry morphemes, such as 서리 (seori) in 모서리 (moseori, “corner”).

By far the most likely explanation is that the Old Korean word simply went extinct and, to quote Alexander Vovin, "will remain a perennial mystery forever".

See also

• 川理 (NAli, “stream”)

References

• 박지용 外 (Park Ji-yong et al.) (2012) 향가 해독 자료집 [hyangga haedok jaryojip, A Sourcebook of Hyangga Interpretations], Seoul National University, page 51
• Alexander Vovin (2020) “Old Korean and Proto-Korean *r and *l Revisited”, in International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics‎^[1], volume 2, pages 94—107