Gǔ yòu 詁幼
Glosses for the Young by 顏之推 (撰)
About the work
A modern reconstruction of 顏之推 Yán Zhītuī’s lost Gǔ yòu 詁幼 (“Glosses for the Young”), originally a short xùngǔ primer of around one juàn that supplied paraphrastic glosses on hard words drawn from a wide range of pre-Suí literature. The work is recorded in Suí shū jīngjí zhì 隋書‧經籍志 — xiǎoxué — and was already lost in the Sòng; the CHANT reconstruction (CH2a1394) assembles the surviving citations from Lù Démíng 陸德明’s Jīngdiǎn shìwén 經典釋文 (especially the Ěryǎ shìwén portion), the Hòu-Hàn shū notes of Lǐ Xián 李賢 and Zhānghuái tàizǐ 章懷太子 (Lǐ Xián’s son), the Guǎngyùn 廣韻 lemma annotations, and the references Yán Zhītuī himself makes to the work in Yánshì jiāxùn 顏氏家訓.
Abstract
The Gǔ yòu is Yán Zhītuī’s own xiǎoxué exercise — a short paraphrastic glossary preserving the kinds of obscure-word reading that his career as a four-dynasty court philologist had accumulated. Surviving fragments show the typical Six-Dynasties xùngǔ format: a head-word, a short paraphrase or fǎn-qiè gloss, and (usually implicit) a literary attestation. The opening preserved entries include zhà 虴 = “zhà-měng 虴蜢, a leaping insect; měng read měng 猛” (cited via Lù Démíng); xuàn 駽 with fǎn-qiè hū-xiàn 呼縣反 (Lù Démíng’s Ěryǎ shìwén citing also Lǚ Chén 呂忱, 顏延之 Yán Yánzhī, and Xún Kǎi 荀楷); and nǔ 努 = “an arrow,” cited from Hòu-Hàn shū Yúfú zhì (Lǐ Xián’s note quotes the variant title 《幼誥》, which the CHANT editor flags as a corrupt rendering of 《詁幼》).
The text is repeatedly cited under the alternative titles 《幼誥》 (in the Hòu-Hàn shū note) and 《告幼童文》 (in Guǎngyùn upper-tone first liáng — gǒng 嗊 character note); both are confirmed by the CHANT editor as scribal variants of the same lost work. The naming alternation reflects the Six-Dynasties tendency to refer to short instructional glossaries by the yòu (“children”) frame rather than by a fixed title.
The dating bracket (575–591) reflects Yán Zhītuī’s mature scholarly period (post-Northern-Qí, in Northern Zhōu / Suí service) and the standard reception convention that the Gǔ yòu was composed alongside the Yánshì jiāxùn in the author’s last decades; the Yánshì jiāxùn explicitly cross-references the Gǔ yòu in its Shū-zhèng 書證 chapter.
Translations and research
No substantial dedicated Western-language secondary literature located. The standard treatments are:
- Rén Dàchūn 任大椿 (1738–1789), Xiǎoxué gōuchén 小學鉤沈 — the Qīng-period reconstruction on which CHANT and all later editions depend.
- Mǎ Guóhàn 馬國翰 (1794–1857), Yùhánshānfáng jíyìshū 玉函山房輯佚書 — parallel reconstruction.
Other points of interest
The textual identity of 《詁幼》/《幼誥》/《告幼童文》 — and Yán Zhītuī’s authorship of all three — was established by Rén Dàchūn on the strength of cross-attestations among the Táng-Sòng commentarial citations; the CHANT entry incorporates Rén’s note. The work is one of the very few Six-Dynasties xiǎoxué compositions attached to a named survivor of the Liáng–Qí–Zhōu–Suí transition and therefore documents how the southern philological tradition was carried north after the sack of Jiānglíng (555).
Links
- Suí shū jīngjí zhì — xiǎoxué: https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&res=613103
- Yánshì jiāxùn — Shū zhèng (chapter cross-referencing Gǔ yòu): https://ctext.org/yan-shi-jia-xun