| heart; mind | sound; noise; news | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| simp. and trad. (心音) |
心 | 音 | |
心音
| Kanji in this term | |
|---|---|
| 心 | 音 |
| しん Grade: 2 |
おん Grade: 1 |
| on’yomi | |
This word is attested three times in Seok Hwaeomgyo Bun'gi (석화염교분기 / 釋華嚴敎分記), a Korean-language gloss from c. 960 of a seventh-century Huayan text, and seventeen times in a twelfth-century gloss of the Avatamsaka Sutra. It is also found in the first-millennium hyangga poems, both in isolation and in forms attached to a locative or genitive suffix, e.g. 心未 (*MOSOm-oy).
心音 (*MOSOm)
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 心音, the first character shows that this is the native Old Korean word for “mind”, and the subsequent character(s) show(s) that the coda consonant of this word is *-m. Because the semantics and the final phoneme(s) match, the word is conventionally reconstructed as *MOSOm, the ancestor of Middle Korean ᄆᆞᅀᆞᆷ (Yale: mozom). 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.