매사는 불여 튼튼
everything-TOPIC blow-[?]-strong[ly]
In everything blow [as on a fire] strongly.
I don’t know what to do with the particle -여 after the 불 (flame? if it’s a noun). Is it a form of the copula? Is it some other thing? So… is it a conjugation of the 불다 (blow) instead? The one place I found this proverb with any kind of translation, it was correlated with a meaning something like “Always double-check.” So I’m going to go with a strange defective conjugation of 불다, maybe a kind of imperative, I guess, but I feel like I’m not really understanding this. The word order is very non-Korean-seeming, too – why is there a sort of adverbialized 튼튼 at the end? That’s not a normal place for it.
