毛冬

Etymology
Potentially a compound of +  +. Compare 🇨🇬.

Adverb

 * 1) cannot;
 * 2) poorly
 * 1) poorly
 * 1) poorly
 * 1) poorly

Usage notes
This form is used in the orthography of the  poems, written between the late seventh and late tenth centuries, and once in a 1262 document.

The Interpretive  glosses to the Buddhist canon written between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, which represent the largest and best-understood corpus of the Old Korean language, instead use two different forms to denote inability. The " glossing tradition", which appears to have been more mainstream, consistently uses the adverb. The divergent " glossing tradition" typically uses the adverb, which for a long time remained uninterpretable. The recent discovery (in 2009) and interpretation (in the late 2010s) of a gloss of the Sutra of the Repentance Ritual of Great Compassion, which belongs to the latter tradition, gives suggestive evidence that was a graphic abbreviation involving the first stroke of, and that  was to be read as *mwotol. For a similar example of a gugyeol gloss which was read out as to replace the actual Chinese equivalent, see.

The reason that the two glossing traditions used apparently different words to express "cannot", and whether and  are related or unrelated terms, remains unknown.

As with Middle and Modern Korean (see and ), the Old Korean  construction had two forms: a short form in which the adverb directly preceded the negated verb, and a long form in which the adverb negated the verb  similar to English do-support. However, unlike in Middle and Modern Korean, did not act as a true auxiliary verb, as the main verb was nominalized to become the direct object of.

According to the analysis of Mun Hyeon-su, when the main verb was modified by another adverb, word order in the long form construction of differed from the long form construction of :


 * Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra tradition: [NOMINALIZED VERB] [ADVERB]
 * Avatamsaka Sutra tradition: [NOMINALIZED VERB] [ADVERB]
 * Middle and Modern Korean: [ADVERB] [MAIN VERB]