倭理

Etymology
.

Noun

 * 1)  the Japanese

Reconstruction notes
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 倭理, the first character shows that this is the native Old Korean word for "Japanese", and the subsequent character shows that the final syllable of this word is or.

While the Middle Korean descendant does not fully preserve the Old Korean form, 🇨🇬 has a diphthong and a rising pitch, which is often the result of a loss of a medial : cf. >, >  Hence the word is conventionally reconstructed as  or. 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.

Middle Korean merged Old Korean and  unconditionally, and it is not easy to determine the Old Korean phoneme based on the Middle Korean reflex. Old Korean reconstructions are conventionally given in the Yale Romanization of Korean, which makes only those phonemic distinctions also made in Middle Korean. However, Alexander Vovin gives circumstantial evidence that the syllable being transcribed by is  with a rhotic consonant.

The sixth-century wooden tablet corpus excavated at Haman Seongsan Sanseong includes two tablets, one with an apparent toponym and the other with, which appear to contain otherwise identical information by the same author. Lee Seung-jae speculates that and  were the same toponym, allowing the reconstruction of  with the assumption that  is being used as a semantically adapted phonogram for, the Korean word for "ten". If so, in  would be a logogram. Lee further speculates that this logogram was used because the Japanese were then considered the archetypal enemies of the ancient people. (Conversely, if Lee's speculations are valid, the specific exonym may possibly have derived from a generic "enemy" sense, a semantic shift attested elsewhere.)