Wade–Giles

History

Wade–Giles was developed by Thomas Francis Wade, a scholar of Chinese and a British ambassador in China who was the first professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge. Wade published Yü-yen Tzŭ-erh Chi () in 1867, the first textbook on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin in English, which became the basis for the system later known as Wade–Giles. The system, designed to transcribe Chinese terms for Chinese specialists, was further refined in 1892 by Herbert Giles (in A Chinese–English Dictionary), a British diplomat in China, and his son Lionel Giles, a curator at the British Museum.

Taiwan used Wade–Giles for decades as the de facto standard, co-existing with several official romanizations in succession, namely, Gwoyeu Romatzyh (1928), Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (1986), and Tongyong Pinyin (2000). Under Ma Ying-jeou's Kuomintang (KMT)-led government, in 2009, Taiwan officially adopted pinyin, and the English romanisations on a number of street signs in cities with then Kuomintang mayors were switched over to conform to this. However, the majority of the people in Taiwan, both resident and overseas, still use spelling and transcribe their legal names based on the Wade–Giles system, as well as the other aforementioned systems.

Initials and finals

The tables below show the Wade–Giles representation of each Chinese sound (in bold type), together with the corresponding IPA phonetic symbol (in square brackets), and equivalent representations in Bopomofo and Hanyu Pinyin.

Initials

Instead of ts, ts and s, Wade–Giles writes tz, tz and ss before ŭ (see below).

Finals

Wade–Giles writes -uei after k and k, otherwise -ui: kuei, kuei, hui, shui, chui.

It writes as -o after k, k and h, otherwise as -ê: ko, ko, ho, shê, chê. When forms a syllable on its own, it is written ê or o depending on the character.

Wade–Giles writes as -uo after k, k, h and sh, otherwise as -o: kuo, kuo, huo, shuo, bo, tso. After ch, it is written cho or chuo depending on the character.

For -ih and -ŭ, see below.

Giles's A Chinese–English Dictionary also includes the finals -io (in yo, chio, chio, hsio, lio and nio) and -üo (in chüo, chüo, hsüo, lüo and nüo), both of which are pronounced -üeh in modern Standard Chinese: yüeh, chüeh, chüeh, hsüeh, lüeh and nüeh.

Syllables that begin with a medial

Wade–Giles writes the syllable as i or yi depending on the character.

System features

Consonants and initial symbols

A feature of the Wade–Giles system is the representation of the unaspirated-aspirated stop consonant pairs using a character resembling an apostrophe. Thomas Wade and others used the spiritus asper ( or ), borrowed from the polytonic orthography of the Ancient Greek language. Herbert Giles and others used a left (opening) curved single quotation mark (‘) for the same purpose. A third group used a plain apostrophe ('). The backtick, and visually similar characters, are sometimes seen in various electronic documents using the system.

Examples using the spiritus asper: p, p, t, t, k, k, ch, ch. The use of this character preserves b, d, g, and j for the romanization of Chinese varieties containing voiced consonants, such as Shanghainese (which has a full set of voiced consonants) and Min Nan (Hō-ló-oē) whose century-old Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ, often called Missionary Romanization) is similar to Wade–Giles. POJ, Legge romanization, Simplified Wade, and EFEO Chinese transcription use the letter instead of an apostrophe-like character to indicate aspiration. (This is similar to the obsolete IPA convention before the revisions of the 1970s). The convention of an apostrophe-like character or to denote aspiration is also found in romanizations of other Asian languages, such as McCune–Reischauer for Korean and ISO 11940 for Thai.

People unfamiliar with Wade–Giles often ignore the spiritus asper, sometimes omitting them when copying texts, unaware that they represent vital information. Hanyu Pinyin addresses this issue by employing the Latin letters customarily used for voiced stops, unneeded in Mandarin, to represent the unaspirated stops: b, p, d, t, g, k, j, q, zh, ch.

Partly because of the popular omission of apostrophe-like characters, the four sounds represented in Hanyu Pinyin by j, q, zh, and ch often all become ch, including in many proper names. However, if the apostrophe-like characters are kept, the system reveals a symmetry that leaves no overlap:

• The non-retroflex ch (Pinyin j) and ch (Pinyin q) are always before either ü or i, but never ih.
• The retroflex ch (Pinyin zh) and ch (Pinyin ch) are always before ih, a, ê, e, o, or u.

Vowels and final symbols

Syllabic consonants

Like Yale and Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, Wade–Giles renders the two types of syllabic consonant (; Wade–Giles: kung1-yün4; Hanyu Pinyin: kōngyùn) differently:

• -ŭ is used after the sibilants written in this position (and this position only) as tz, tz and ss (Pinyin z, c and s).
• -ih is used after the retroflex ch, ch, sh, and j (Pinyin zh, ch, sh, and r). These finals are both written as -ih in Tongyong Pinyin, as -i in Hanyu Pinyin (hence distinguishable only by the initial from as in li), and as -y in Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Simplified Wade. They are typically omitted in Bopomofo.

Vowel ''o''

Final o in Wade–Giles has two pronunciations in modern Peking dialect: and .

What is pronounced in vernacular Peking dialect as a close-mid back unrounded vowel is written usually as ê, but sometimes as o, depending on historical pronunciation (at the time Wade–Giles was developed). Specifically, after velar initials k, k and h (and a historical ng, which had been dropped by the time Wade–Giles was developed), o is used; for example, "哥" is ko1 (Pinyin gē) and "刻" is ko4 (Pinyin kè). In Peking dialect, o after velars (and what used to be ng) have shifted to , thus they are written as ge, ke, he and e in Pinyin. When forms a syllable on its own, Wade–Giles writes ê or o depending on the character. In all other circumstances, it writes ê.

What is pronounced in Peking dialect as is usually written as o in Wade–Giles, except for wo, shuo (e.g. "說" shuo1) and the three syllables of kuo, kuo, and huo (as in 過, 霍, etc.), which contrast with ko, ko, and ho that correspond to Pinyin ge, ke, and he. This is because characters like 羅, 多, etc. (Wade–Giles: lo2, to1; Pinyin: luó, duō) did not originally carry the medial . Peking dialect does not have phonemic contrast between o and -uo/wo (except in interjections when used alone) and a medial is usually inserted in front of -o to form .

Zhuyin and Pinyin write as ㄛ -o after ㄅ b, ㄆ p, ㄇ m and ㄈ f, and as ㄨㄛ -uo after all other initials.

Tones

Tones are indicated in Wade–Giles using superscript numbers (1–4) placed after the syllable. This contrasts with the use of diacritics to represent the tones in Pinyin. For example, the Pinyin qiàn (fourth tone) has the Wade–Giles equivalent chien4.

Punctuation

Wade–Giles uses hyphens to separate all syllables within a word (whereas Pinyin separates syllables only in specially defined cases, using hyphens or closing (right) single quotation marks as appropriate).

If a syllable is not the first in a word, its first letter is not capitalized, even if it is part of a proper noun. The use of apostrophe-like characters, hyphens, and capitalization is frequently not observed in place names and personal names. For example, the majority of overseas Taiwanese people write their given names like "Tai Lun" or "Tai-Lun", whereas the Wade–Giles is actually "Tai-lun". (See also Chinese names.)

Comparison with other systems

{{Anchor|Pinyin}}Pinyin

• Wade–Giles chose the French-like (implying a sound like IPA's , as in s in English measure) to represent a Northern Mandarin pronunciation of what is represented as in pinyin (Northern Mandarin / Southern Mandarin )
• Ü (representing ) always has an umlaut above, while pinyin only employs it in the cases of zh, zh, zh, zh and zh, while leaving it out after j, q, x and y as a simplification because / cannot otherwise appear after those letters. (The vowel / can occur in those cases in pinyin where the diaeresis are indicated / or ; in which cases it serves to distinguish the front vowel from the back vowel . By contrast it is always present to mark the front vowel in Wade–Giles.) Because zh (as in 玉 "jade") must have an umlaut in Wade–Giles, the umlaut-less zh in Wade–Giles is freed up for what corresponds to zh ({{linktext|有}} "have"/"there is") in Pinyin.
• The Pinyin cluster is in Wade–Giles, reflecting the pronunciation of as in English book . (Compare kung1-fu to zh as an example.)
• After a consonant, both Wade–Giles and Pinyin use and instead of the complete syllables: and /.

Chart

Note: In Hanyu Pinyin, the so-called neutral tone is written leaving the syllable with no diacritic mark at all. In Tongyong Pinyin, a ring is written over the vowel.

Adaptations

There are several adaptations of Wade–Giles.

''Mathews''

The romanization system used in the 1943 edition of Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary differs from Wade–Giles in the following ways:

• It uses the right apostrophe: p, t, k, ch, ts, tzŭ; while Wade–Giles uses the left apostrophe, similar to the aspiration diacritic used in the International Phonetic Alphabet before the revisions of the 1970s: p, t, k, ch, ts, tzŭ.
• It consistently uses i for the syllable , while Wade–Giles uses i or yi depending on the character.
• It uses o for the syllable , while Wade–Giles uses ê or o depending on the character.
• It offers the choice between ssŭ and szŭ, while Wade–Giles requires ssŭ.
• It does not use the spellings chio, chio, hsio, yo, replacing them with chüeh, chüeh, hsüeh, yüeh in accordance with their modern pronunciations.
• It uses an underscored 3 to denote a second tone which comes from an original third tone, but only if the following syllable has the neutral tone and the tone sandhi is therefore not predictable: hsiao3•chieh.
• It denotes the neutral tone by placing a dot (if the neutral tone is compulsory) or a circle (if the neutral tone is optional) before the syllable. The dot or circle replaces the hyphen.

''Shadick''

In Harold Shadick's A First Course in Literary Chinese, the following modifications are made to Wade–Giles:

• Tones are marked with diacritics instead of tone numbers. The diacritics used are the same as in Yale and Pinyin.
• ssu is replaced with szu.
• ê and ŭ are written as e and u.

The Chinese phrase 文言文入門 (Wên2-yen2 wên2 ju4-mên2) would thus be romanized as Wén-yén wén jù-mén.

''Anderson''

Main article: Simplified Wade

This adaptation of Wade–Giles by Olov Anderson has several distinctive features, most notably the use of tonal spelling and the replacement of apostrophes with the letter ⟨h⟩. For example, the aspirated consonants pʻ, tʻ and kʻ become ph, th and kh. Tones are marked by appending the silent letters ⟨v⟩, ⟨x⟩ and ⟨z⟩ to a syllable. Additionally, ŭ is written as y, and circumflexes and -h are dropped in the final position.

Table

Main article: Wade–Giles table

Gallery

Examples of Wade–Giles derived English language terminology: File:Sign of Buddhist Tzu Chi University at the main entrance.JPG|Tzu Chi University, Hualien File:Lienchiang County Health Bureau and Lienchiang County Hospital 20140405.jpg|Lienchiang County Hospital and Health Bureau File:Emblem of Pingtung County.svg|Emblem of Pingtung County

References

Bibliography

• Wade, Thomas Francis. A progressive course designed to assist the student of Colloquial Chinese (Yü Yen Tzǔ Êrh Chi) in two volumes. Third edition Shanghai: Hong Kong: Singapore: Yokohama: London: Kelly & Walsh, Limited, 1903.
• Giles, Herbert A. A Chinese–English Dictionary. 2-vol. & 3-vol. versions both. London: Shanghai: Bernard Quaritch; Kelly and Walsh, 1892. Rev. & enlarged 2nd ed. in 3 vols. (Vol. I: front-matter & a-hsü, Vol. II: hsü-shao, and Vol. III: shao-yün), Shanghai: Hong Kong: Singapore: Yokohama: London: Kelly & Walsh, Limited; Bernard Quaritch, 1912. Rpt. of the 2nd ed. but in 2 vols. and bound as 1, New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1964.

References

1. "Language Subtag Registry". IANA.
2. Wade, Thomas Francis. (1867). "Yü-yen Tzŭ-erh Chi: A Progressive Course Designed to Assist the Student of Colloquial Chinese, As Spoken in the Capital and the Metropolitan Department". Trübner.
3. Kaske, Elisabeth. (2008). "The Politics of Language in Chinese Education: 1895–1919". Brill.
4. "Chinese Language Transliteration Systems – Wade–Giles". UCLA film and television archive.
5. Shih, Hsiu-Chuan. (18 September 2008). "Hanyu Pinyin to be standard system in 2009".
6. (17 June 2011). "綠委：台灣使用漢語拼音　成為中國一部分".
7. ''[[A Chinese–English Dictionary]]''.
8. ''[[A Chinese–English Dictionary]]'', p. 761.
9. ''[[Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary]]''.
10. Shadick, Harold. (1968). "A First Course in Literary Chinese". Cornell University Press.