Placename glosses in the Samguk sagi

Chapter 37 of the Samguk sagi ('History of the Three Kingdoms', 1145) contains a list of place names and their meanings, from part of central Korea captured by Silla from the former state of Goguryeo (Koguryŏ).

Some of the vocabulary extracted from these names provides the principal evidence that Japonic languages were formerly spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula.

[2] Chapter 37, dealing mostly with places in the Goguryeo lands seized by Silla, has a different format, with a series of items of the form A一云B (A 'one [source] calls' B)These formulas were first studied by Naitō Konan (1907), Miyazaki Michizaburō (1907) and Shinmura Izuru (1916).

For example, another entry is: 七重縣一云難隱別In this case, the first part, 七重縣, can be read in Chinese as 'seven-fold county', while 難隱別 is meaningless, and hence seems to represent the sound of the name.

[11][12] Characters like 買 and 忽 presumably represented pronunciations based on some local version of the Chinese reading tradition, but there is no agreement on what this sounded like.

[33] Christopher I. Beckwith, assuming that the characters represented a form of northeast Chinese, for which he offers his own reconstruction, claims a much larger proportion of Japonic cognates.

[34] Beckwith's linguistic analysis has been criticized for the ad hoc nature of his Chinese reconstructions, for his handling of Japonic material and for hasty rejection of possible cognates in other languages.