Nihon Shoki

The Japanese history Nihon Shoki, compiled in the early 8th century from earlier documents, including some from Baekje, records 42 Baekje words. These are transcribed as Old Japanese syllables, which are restricted to the form (C)V, limiting the precision of the transcription.^[11]

Early Japan imported many artifacts from Baekje and the Gaya confederacy, and several of the above matching Old Japanese forms are believed to have been borrowed from Baekje at that time.^[16] Such borrowing would also explain the fact that words such as kaso₂ 'father', ki₂ 'fortress', ko₂po₂ri 'district' and kuti 'hawk' are limited to Western Old Japanese, with no cognates in Eastern Old Japanese or Ryukyuan languages.^[17] Moreover, for some words, like 'father' and 'mother', there are alternative words in Old Japanese that are attested across the Japonic family (titi and papa respectively).^[18] Bentley lists these words, as well as kuma 'bear' and suki₂ 'village', as loans into Old Japanese from Baekje.^[19] Alexander Vovin argues that the only Baekje words from the Nihon Shoki found throughout Japonic, such as sema island and kuma 'bear', are those also common to Koreanic.^[17]

Other histories

The Middle Korean text Yongbieocheonga transcribes the name of the old Baekje capital 'Bear Ford' as kwomá nolo, closely matching two of the words from the Nihon Shoki.^[20]

Chapter 49 of the Chinese Book of Zhou (636) cites three Baekje words:^{[4][lower-alpha 3]}

• ʔyo-la-hae (於羅瑕) 'king' (used by the gentry)
• kjon-kjit-tsye (鞬吉支) 'king' (used by commoners)
• ʔyo-ljuwk (於陸) 'queen'

These may be the same words as orikoke 'king', ki₁si 'ruler' and oruku 'queen' respectively, found in the Nihon Shoki.^[21]

Chapter 54 of the Book of Liang (635) gives four Baekje words:^[22]

• ku^H-mae (固麻) 'ruling fortress'
• yem-lu^X (檐魯) 'settlement'
• pjuwk-syaem (複衫) 'short jacket'
• kwon (褌) 'pants'

None of these have Koreanic etymologies, but Vovin suggests that the first might be cognate with Old Japanese ko₂me₂ 'enclose', and the second with Old Japanese ya 'house' + maro₂ 'circle'.^[22][23] He views this as limited evidence for Kōno's two-language hypothesis, and suggests that the language of the commoners may have been the same Peninsular Japonic language reflected by placename glosses in the Samguk sagi from the northern part of Baekje captured by Goguryeo in the 5th century.^[24][25]

The Baekje placenames in chapter 37 of the Samguk sagi are not glossed, but several of them include the form 夫里 pju-li^X, which has been compared with later Korean pul 'plain'.^[26]

Wooden tablets

Wooden tablets dated to the late Baekje era have been discovered by archaeologists, and some of them involve the rearrangement of Classical Chinese words according to native syntax. From this data, the word order of Baekje appears to have been similar to that of Old Korean. Unlike in Silla texts, however, no uncontroversial evidence of non-Chinese grammatical morphemes has been found.^[27] Compared to Silla tablets, Baekje tablets are far more likely to employ conventional Classical Chinese syntax and vocabulary without any native influence.^[28]

The tablets also give the names of 12 locations and 77 individuals.^[29] A total of 147 phonographic characters have been identified from these proper nouns, but this is insufficient to allow a reconstruction of the phonology.^[30]

A tablet found in the Baekje-built temple of Mireuksa, originally thought to be a list of personal names, appears to record native numerals, possibly a series of dates. Although the tablet is dated to the early Later Silla period, postdating the 660 fall of Baekje, its orthography differs from conventional Old Korean orthography. In the extant Silla texts, a native numeral is written by a logogram-phonogram sequence, but in this tablet, they are written entirely with phonograms (both phonetically and semantically adapted). Lee Seungjae thus suggests that the tablet is written in Baekje numerals. The numerals appear Koreanic, with a suffix 邑 *-(ə)p that may be cognate to the Early Middle Korean ordinal suffix *-m.^{[31][lower-alpha 4]}