不知

Verb

 * 1) to not know; to have no idea of; to be ignorant of
 * 2) to wonder if
 * 1) to wonder if
 * 1) to wonder if
 * 1) to wonder if

Noun

 * 1) ignorance not knowing
 * 2) ignorance lacking intelligence

Etymology
Potentially a compound of +  +.

Usage notes

 * This particle was restricted to negating nouns, including nominalized verbs. Verbs were negated with the adverb instead. In every uncontroversial example in the currently known corpus, adjectives were nominalized and then negated with . 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 served as both a noun and an adverb, having displaced 不冬, and the Modern reflex behaves solely as an adverb. The contemporary form, showing an incorporation of the copula  which combines only with nouns, remains as a vestige of the Old Korean function.
 * Vovin argues that the variant  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  as a graphic variant of  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 . Furthermore, there appears to be no semantic difference between  and . On the other hand, it is difficult to explain how  could ever have been taken as a phonogram for *ti.

Descendants

 * Proto-Northern Tungusic: *anti
 * Proto-Northern Tungusic: *anti
 * Proto-Northern Tungusic: *anti
 * Proto-Northern Tungusic: *anti
 * Proto-Northern Tungusic: *anti
 * Proto-Northern Tungusic: *anti