沈寵綏在《度曲須知‧字釐南北》一篇中，舉例說明有些字唱北曲時要“屬陰”，有些要“屬陽”。但是“屬陰”、“屬陽”的判準是什麼，沈寵綏卻語焉不詳。我們注意到這些例子全部是去聲字，而去聲字在吳語與《中原音韻》的音類對應上是不一致的。進一步比較，我們發現沈寵綏並不能真正掌握這些不一致對應的關鍵，因此只能以韻首小字的吳語讀法來定同音字組的清濁。這就造成來自清聲母的去聲字「屬陽」的錯誤判斷。歸根究底，他的判準是無效的。

In his monumental work Notes on Qu- Measuring, Shen Chong-sui claimed that, when singing northern Qu, a kind of songs to be sung in drama, some words’ initials should be pronounced as “Ying” , i.e. voiceless, while the others’ initials should be pronounced as “Yang”, i.e. voiced. The criterion of his judgement, however, remains unclear. A careful examination of his examples, we found that Shen had depended his choice between “Ying” and “Yang” on the phonetic feature of the representative character of each rhyme category in Chong-yuan Yin-Yun, a rhyme book of northern Qu, or its revised version Chong-zhou Yin-Yun. Shen’s criterion is obviously unjustifiable, because in the language on which northern Qu based, there was no voiced obstruent at all. Shen was misled by his own dialect which kept the initial’s difference of voiceless vs. voiced.

沈寵綏;《度曲須知》;《中原音韻》;屬陰;屬陽

Shen Chong-sui; Notes on Qu- Measuring; Chong-yuan Yin-Yun; Ying; Yang