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(N.B. Gugyeol glyphs are given in non-abbreviated forms.)
Usage notes
This particle was restricted to negating nouns, including nominalized verbs. Verbs were negated with the adverb 不冬(*ANtol) instead. In every uncontroversial example in the currently known corpus, adjectives were nominalized and then negated with 不知(*ANti). Whether this represents a genuine grammatical phenomenon in Old Korean or simply coincidence due to the very limited corpus is not clear.
Its Middle Korean reflex 아니〮(àní) served as both a noun and an adverb, having displaced 不冬, and the Modern reflex behaves solely as an adverb. The contemporary form 아니다(anida, “to not be”), showing an incorporation of the copula -이다(-ida, “to be”) which combines only with nouns, remains as a vestige of the Old Korean function.
Vovin argues that the Idu script variant 不喩 should be seen as a related but different form, which he reconstructs as approximately *AN-koy. Both would be derived from the hypothetical negative root *an-. The conventional view in Korean scholarship is to read 不喩 as a graphic variant of 不知 because fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Idu manuals in Hangul, which conserve significant elements of the Old Korean reading of phonograms, gloss the former sequence as 아닌디(aninti). Furthermore, there appears to be no semantic difference between 不知 and 不喩. On the other hand, it is difficult to explain how 喩 could ever have been taken as a phonogram for *ti.