바다

Etymology
from pre-Middle Korean, a form still preserved directly in certain southern dialects. An Old Korean phrase attested in a tenth-century poem,, has sometimes been segmented as , which would provide direct attestation of *pàták. However, this is conventionally understood as, with a spelling variant of the fused locative.

The may be the remnant of an archaic place suffix (see Appendix:Middle Korean h-final nouns), which leaves  as the etymological root; this notion is further supported by the existence of the alternative Middle Korean form, representing intervocalic lenition of  to  (phonemically ) from 🇨🇬, a form presumably related to *pàták but with different suffixation. Despite being both the only attested Old Korean form and the more common Middle Korean form, the variant with coda is now lost in most dialects.

The word may speculatively be related to, according to Kim 2008. Beyond Korean, the word is believed to be related to 🇨🇬, perhaps via ancient borrowing from Korean to Japanese, given the apparent lack of derivatives in Japonic languages, compared to the established Japonic root with many derived terms.

Noun

 * 1) sea, ocean