Yùn jí 韻集
A Rhyme Collection by 呂靜 (撰)
About the work
A modern reconstruction of 呂靜 Lǚ Jìng’s lost Yùn jí 韻集 — the principal Jìn-period rhyme dictionary, refining and extending 李登 Lǐ Dēng’s KR1j0110 Shēng lèi. Suí shū jīngjí zhì 隋書‧經籍志 records the work in five juàn. Lǚ Jìng was the son of Lǚ Chén 呂忱 (compiler of the lost Zì lín 字林) — the principal Jìn-period xiǎoxué family lineage. The work was lost in the late Táng or Sòng; the CHANT reconstruction (CH2f1224) draws principally from 顏之推’s Yánshì jiāxùn ‧ Yīn-cí 顏氏家訓‧音辭, from Lù Démíng 陸德明’s Jīngdiǎn shìwén 經典釋文, and from the Guǎngyùn 廣韻.
Abstract
The Yùn jí matters in the history of Chinese phonology as the principal northern Jìn-period rhyme dictionary — a generation later than Lǐ Dēng’s Shēng lèi and three centuries before the Suí Qièyùn (601). Surviving fragments are short head-graph entries giving rhyme-category assignment and (usually) a fǎn-qiè spelling.
The most famous preserved item is 顏之推’s criticism in the Yánshì jiāxùn ‧ Yīn-cí chapter: “The Yùn jí groups chéng 成, réng 仍, hóng 宏, dēng 登 into two rhymes.” Yán Zhītuī objected that this collapsed two distinct Middle-Chinese rhyme categories into one — the kind of pre-Qièyùn idiosyncrasy that the Suí synthesis would correct. The Yùn jí’s rhyme-coarseness is one of the principal indirect witnesses to the Jìn-period phonological system that the Qièyùn would refine.
The work also supplies a substantial layer of paraphrastic glosses on rare-graph readings, preserved chiefly through Lù Démíng. The Lǚ Chén / Lǚ Jìng father-son pair (Zì lín + Yùn jí) constitute the foundational Jìn-period xiǎoxué lineage.
Dating bracket (280–350): broad Jìn span; the Zì lín of Lǚ Chén is a terminus a quo for the Yùn jí. The Yánshì jiāxùn critique (sixth century) supplies a terminus ante quem of attested reception.
Translations and research
No substantial dedicated Western-language secondary literature located. See:
- Bernhard Karlgren, Études sur la phonologie chinoise, 1915–1926 — the foundational reconstruction of Middle Chinese on the rhyme-book tradition.
- Rén Dàchūn 任大椿, Xiǎoxué gōuchén 小學鉤沈.
- Mǎ Guóhàn 馬國翰, Yùhánshānfáng jíyìshū 玉函山房輯佚書.
Other points of interest
顏之推’s critique of the Yùn jí’s chéng-réng / hóng-dēng coarseness is the single most-cited evidence of pre-Qièyùn phonological idiosyncrasy: it documents both the working state of Jìn-period rhyme classification and the southern Liáng xiǎoxué milieu’s standard for what counted as adequate phonological discrimination.
Links
- Suí shū jīngjí zhì — xiǎoxué: https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&res=613103
- Yánshì jiāxùn ‧ Yīn-cí: https://ctext.org/yan-shi-jia-xun