Talk:고마ᄂᆞᄅᆞ

Derivations and relatedness
There are various interesting thought threads converging here.


 * Possible KO ↔ JA cognacy in the word for "bear".
 * That said, see also Talk:곰, which raises the possibility that this is an areal word possibly also cognate with Old Chinese.


 * The Japanese article for the Baekje capital city at 熊津 mentions Japanese sources recording the name as Kumanari, or Komunari, and Baekje sources listing this as, rendered in kana as コマナル (Komanaru) and in hangul as 고마나루.
 * The koma angle caught my eye. Japanese has an old word Koma that appears in ancient texts as a term meaning "Korea, Korean", more specifically referring to Goguryeo or immigrants to Japan from there.  The derivation of this Koma word is lost, as far as I can see in Japanese sources, and I find myself wondering if this is related to this placename.  However, the Old Japanese name for the Baekje kingdom and people is Kudara, which origins are similarly obscure, and likely lie in non-Japanese texts...


 * The Japanese WP article also mentions that the Baekje capital is located on the, read in Japanese as Kuma-gawa, and nowadays named the or the.
 * I don't suppose you've read anything about the name of the river, and any chance that the modern Geum might derive in any way from the older Middle Korean or Baekje place name? Granted, the hanja are totally different, but perhaps the newer 錦 spelling was chosen due to a phonetic similarity to the older 熊?


 * The river makes a sharp bend as it goes through the city location: https://www.google.com/maps?q=%E5%BF%A0%E6%B8%85%E5%8D%97%E9%81%93%E5%85%AC%E5%B7%9E
 * This leads me to wonder if the Old Korean / Baekje might have been engaging in some wordplay in connection the Japanese word (with another sense of "hole, deep recess" as discussed elsewhere).  This may pre-suppose a connection with the modern Korean verb stem, and / or with Old Korean *kwùmùk (where presumably the final  is a locative marker?).  There is a persistent  ↔  alternation that happens in various places in Japonic, and I wonder if this might have occurred in ancient times as well -- if memory serves, some authors have suggested that Baekje may have been linguistically closer to Yamato (Old Japanese) than Silla was.

Curious as to your thoughts. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 06:37, 3 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Re-reading this and the JA WP article, I'm puzzled by the given reading there -- I'd expect to be read as koma nara from a Japanese standpoint, suggesting instead that the latter term might be related instead to  and possibly even the name of the Japanese city Nara / .  Indeed, given the reconstructed Middle and Old Chinese phonetic values for  and, I'd expect the Baekje reading of the latter half to be somewhat similar to.
 * Incidentally, if you're up for it, I'd appreciate it if you could update w:Nara_(city) -- that currently incorrectly states that there is no textual Old Korean evidence for the precursor of modern 🇨🇬, but I see that you've added 🇨🇬, which would seem to refute that.
 * Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 20:03, 3 November 2020 (UTC)


 * , these are very interesting ideas to consider.
 * Gongju (公州) and Geum-gang (錦江) are both phonogramic Sino-Korean writings of 곰~고마. We know this because Gongju was written as 熊州 until 940, when the written name was changed to 公州 as part of a dynastic transition. Similarly, 錦江 was also referred to as 熊津江 onto the fifteenth century.
 * The wordplay suggestion for the etymology is quite intriguing. There's a folktale in modern Gongju about how the river and place is named after a she-bear that kidnapped a human man that she had fallen in love with, then drowned herself in the river when the man managed to escape. Obviously this could be a later folk etymology.
 * There are also similarly sounding words (probably borrowed from ), and  (cf. the second element in ): so perhaps this place was intended to evoke "Bear's Ford", "God's Ford", and "Lord's Ford" at once.
 * The most likely candidate for the second element (given extensive logographic evidence of 津) remains, which—if Baekje had the same vocalism as the eighth-century Silla elite when they adopted what would evolve into modern Sino-Korean, which doesn't seem super likely—would be . The usual reconstructions for Proto-Korean appear to involve a bizarre amount of schwas, however (because all aspirates and consonant clusters appear to come from schwa dropping between consonants). The schwas were probably weakened forms of fuller vowels so perhaps Baekje had instead.
 * Another potential source is, both because of the Japanese nari transcriptions and because the town itself (and not just the stream) was also sometimes written 熊川. And is also possible, as you suggested.
 * As an aside, it's quite fascinating that all three words are attested in Middle Korean with the apparent place suffix: the connective form of ᄂᆞᄅᆞ is .--Karaeng Matoaya (talk) 23:02, 3 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmm, hmm, very interesting, thank you!
 * Thinking further about the latter half of the place name, from a Japanese standpoint, kumanoro sounds like, where kuma is either or , no is the possessive / genitive particle , and ro is ... uncertain.  There is no sensible Japanese term that fits for that -- we have various Japonic words ro, but with senses like "boat oar" or "a certain kind of woven lace".  The Japanese word for "river ford" is , literally asa "shallow" + se "narrows (in a body of water), strait".  The closest possible morpheme in terms of phonetics and semantics both is a suffix -ro that seems to denote a "place" or "location", often with hints of "interior, inside", but this never appears independently, only as a suffix.
 * If we instead take noro as a single piece, there is the Japanese noun . This more commonly refers to "stupidity", but it could also refer to "slow-flowing".  That said, the oldest attestation I can find is for the Classical Japanese adjective form  in the early 1300s, far too young for this.
 * However, given the variation in the vowel values in the Chinese-character spellings and other records, I am uncertain if 🇨🇬 might represent a form of this term after a vowel change has already happened?
 * (Also, apologies for the flood of pings -- I am fascinated by the additional information you're adding to various entries, and ideas are bubbling.)
 * Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 23:45, 3 November 2020 (UTC)


 * -- Belated additional idea about the -nolo portion.
 * In Japanese, we have . This might be related to the idea of a "ford" from the sense of "going across on top of the water".  This verb appears in certain compounds with the idea of "getting over or across something".
 * I note in Korean, we have, presumably "on top of" something else.
 * That final -h is problematic, but I see what looks like the same -h over in verb pair and .  I wonder if the -h here is a suffixing element, suggesting the past existence of a verb ?
 * If so, this would seem to mirror Japanese: 🇨🇬 +, as well as +.
 * Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:56, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
 * is purely based on Korean verb, which has verb stem nolG-. It doesn't have any room for Japanese origin.--荒巻モロゾフ (talk) 07:09, 20 July 2023 (UTC)