| not; no | only; merely; just only; merely; just; but | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| simp. and trad. (不只) |
不 | 只 | |
不只
Potentially a compound of *an (ancestral negating root) + *to (semantically light noun meaning "objective fact", whence Middle Korean ᄃᆞ (to)) + *-k (some kind of suffix).
不只 (*ANTOk)
This form is used by the mainstream "Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra glossing tradition" of Interpretive Gugyeol, referring to all Korean-language glosses to the Buddhist canon up to 1300 except for two glosses of excerpts of the Avatamsaka Sutra and a recently discovered gloss of the Sutra of the Repentance Ritual of Great Compassion, all three of which share idiosyncratic features including the use of what appears to be a graphic abbreviation of 毛冬 (“cannot”).
As with Middle and Modern Korean (see 못 (mot) and 못하다 (mothada)), the Old Korean 不只 construction had two forms: a short form in which the adverb directly preceded the negated verb, and a long form in which the adverb negated the verb 爲 (*hoy-, “to do”) similar to English do-support. However, unlike in Middle and Modern Korean, 爲 did not act as a true auxiliary verb, as the main verb was nominalized to become the direct object of 爲.
According to the analysis of Mun Hyeon-su, when the main verb was modified by another adverb, word order in the long form construction of 不只 differed from the long form construction of 毛冬:
The final phonogram 只 denotes the coda consonant *-k.
This adverb is not attested in Middle Korean Idu script. However, some sixteenth-century Chinese-Korean glossaries for use by schoolchildren gloss the Chinese word 不 as 안ᄃᆞᆨ (Yale: antok), of uncertain meaning. As this is the only known negative ending with *-k in Middle Korean sources and as the Middle Korean glossary genre is celebrated for linguistic archaisms, Old Korean 不只 is conventionally reconstructed as *ANTOk. This also matches 不知 (*ANti) and 不冬 (*ANtol), which use the same logogram.