What is construction of 그러시고는?

Question

What means 그러시고는 (I guess, it means "after that") and what construction it has?

E.g. 그러시고는 몸소 그 탁아소를 찾아주시였다

I guess, it is formed by verb 그렇다, but does the "h" disappear before 시?

Answer 1

Most likely, it's not from 그렇다 ("be like that" - 형용사), but 그러다 ("do like that" - 동사). Followed by the honorific suffix -시-, then -고 ("and"), and finally -는 (topic marker). So the meaning is "after doing that ...".

그렇다/그러다 are similar enough that even native speakers occasionally mix them up, but they are different words. Compare:

어제는 몸시 추웠다. 오늘도 그렇다. = Yesterday was very cold. Today is the same.

어제는 개가 몹시 짖었다. 오늘도 그런다. = Yesterday the dog barked a lot. Today it's doing it again.

Confusingly enough, many inflectional forms will be the same for both words: e.g., past tense is 그랬다, and the ㅎ is removed before -시-, so the honorific present tense is (그렇다->)그러시다 vs (그러다)->그러신다.

(So, in fact, "그러시고는" could be an inflection of both 그렇다 and 그러다! However, 그렇다->그러시고는 seems rather unlikely from the context).

So you will have to use context to disambiguate. (Fortunately, since their meanings are very similar, you don't really need to disambiguate in most cases... which adds to the confusion, I guess.)