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Given the usual cross-linguistic source for negative verbs, some have speculated a compound etymology with the second component being its antonym 有叱(*Is-, “to be”).
This form is attested a total of seventy-seven times across all five known brush-written interpretative gugyeol glosses to the Buddhist canon, composed between the tenth and thirteenth centuries.
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 無叱, the first character shows that this is the native Old Korean word for “to not have”, and the subsequent character(s) show(s) that the coda consonant of this word is *-s. Because the semantics and the final phoneme(s) match, the word is conventionally reconstructed as *EPUs-, the ancestor of Middle Korean 없〯다〮 (Yale: ěpstá). 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.
Although obscured by the essentially logographic orthography, the Old Korean verb stem for "to not have" is believed to have been disyllabic:
Middle Korean 없〯다〮 (Yale: ěpstá) has a bimoraic rising tone, which is the result of the merger of two syllables, the first with a low tone and the other with a high tone. In particular, it belongs to the rare regular rising-pitch class (Class 5), which suggests that the vowel that was lost in the merger of syllables had been in the middle of the verb stem rather than at its end (the loss of a stem-final vowel should have produced a Class 6 verb).
A more phonologically precise shape of the word is provided in Jilin leishi, a twelfth-century wordlist of Korean terms as transcribed by a Chinese ambassador. Leishi writes the Old Korean word for Chinese 無／无(“not being; not having”) as 不鳥實／不鸟实. This appears to be a copyist's error for 烏不實／乌不实, a sequence reconstructed in Late Middle Chinese as roughly */ʔuo pɨu ʂɦiɪt/. As the /-iɪt/ ending is believed to transcribe the Old Korean nominalizer 尸(-l), the Old Korean verb stem for "to not be; to not have" must have been pronounced similar to */ʔuopɨuʂɦ-/.
Put together, the internal and Leishi evidence suggests a disyllabic verb stem in Old Korean resembling *èpús-.
Descendants
Middle Korean: 없〯다〮(ěpstá, “to not have; to not be ”)