梦稿本与程甲本“促狭”用字异文考

A Study on the Character Variants of “Cùxiá” between the Menggao Manuscript and the Chengjia Edition

摘要: 《红楼梦》版本异文是文字学与版本学交叉研究的重要切入点，其中“促狭/促侠”这组异文尚未得到系统的文字学考证。本文以张涌泉先生《汉语俗字研究》的俗字定义与核心特征为判定标准，借鉴曾良先生《明清小说俗字研究》中刻工俗写分析与跨文体互证的研究方法，通过版本对勘、文字学考辨与同期文献互证，对梦稿本与程甲本的“促狭”用字异文展开研究。研究发现，梦稿本11例“促狭”用字统一，程甲本则呈现“前80回4例‘促侠’与4例‘促狭’杂用、后40回全作‘促狭’”的分布特征。综合形音关系与文献用例来看，“狭”与“侠”声旁相同、形旁形近且清代读音一致，“促侠”并非通假字或个别笔误，是清代通行于北方官话区民间的形近音近型俗字。

Abstract: Variant characters across editions of A Dream of Red Mansions serve as a vital entry point for the interdisciplinary research between Chinese philology and edition studies. Among them, the variant pair of cùxiá (written as cùxiá) and cùxiá (written as cùxiá) has not been subjected to systematic philological investigation. Taking the definition and core characteristics of vulgar characters established by Zhang Yongquan in Studies on Chinese Vulgar Characters as the evaluative criterion, and drawing on the research paradigms of carvers’ vulgar writing analysis and cross-genre mutual verification from Zeng Liang’s Studies on Vulgar Characters in Novels of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, this paper examines the character variants of cùxiá between the Menggao Manuscript and the Chengjia Edition via edition collation, philological analysis, and corroboration with contemporary documents. The results demonstrate that all 11 occurrences of cùxiá in the Menggao Manuscript are uniformly written as cùxiá. By contrast, the Chengjia Edition shows a clear distribution pattern: in the first 80 chapters, 4 instances of cùxiá are written as cùxiá, coexisting with another 4 instances written as cùxiá; all instances in the remaining 40 chapters consistently adopt the form cùxiá. A comprehensive analysis of graphic and phonetic relations, combined with documentary evidence, indicates that cù and xiá share an identical phonetic component, bear similar semantic radicals, and were homophonous in the Qing Dynasty. It is therefore concluded that cùxiá (cùxiá) is neither a phonetic loan character nor an isolated scribal error. Instead, it is a type of vulgar character formed by graphic and phonetic similarity, which was widely circulated in folk usage across the Northern Mandarin dialect region during the Qing Dynasty.