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Giles

Wade-Giles (Simplified Chinese: 威妥玛拼音 or 韦氏拼音), sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a Romanization system (phonetic notation and transliteration) for the Chinese language based on the form of Mandarin used in Beijing. more...

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It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade in the mid-19th century, and reached settled form with Herbert Giles's Chinese-English dictionary of 1892.

Wade-Giles was the main system of transliteration in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century, replacing the Nanjing-based romanization systems that had been common until late in the 19th century. It has mostly been replaced by the pinyin system today, but remains in use in the Republic of China (Taiwan).

History

The Republic of China (Taiwan) has used Wade-Giles for decades as the de facto standard, co-existing with several official but obscure Romanizations in succession, namely, Gwoyeu Romatzyh (1928), MPS II (1986), and Tongyong Pinyin (2000). Taiwanese placenames in international use have still been virtually all in Wade-Giles. Many Taiwanese Americans and Taiwanese Canadians also have their Chinese names written in Wade-Giles, while consistently ignoring some punctuation.

The Hanyu Pinyin system is the official and most widely used system in the People's Republic of China. In Singapore, Pinyin is taught in national schools and widely used in official documents, although an about-turn in government policy reversed the requirement to register people's Chinese names in Pinyin. Wade-Giles spellings for Taiwanese placenames and words long accepted in English usage are still used interchangeably in English language texts in both countries, however.

Technical aspects

One symbol-multiple sounds

A common complaint about the Wade-Giles system is the representation of the unaspirated-aspirated stop consonant pairs using apostrophes: p, p', t, t', k, k', ch, ch'. However, the use of apostrophes preserves b, d, g, and j for the romanization of Chinese dialects containing voiced consonants, such as Shanghainese (which has a full set of voiced consonants) and Taiwanese (Hō-ló-oē) whose century-old Missionary Romanisation is similar to Wade-Giles.

On the other hand, people unfamiliar with the Wade-Giles often ignore the apostrophes, even so far as leaving them out 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 the apostrophe, the four sounds represented in Hanyu Pinyin by j, q, zh, and ch all become ch in many literature and personal names. However, were the diacritics to be kept, the system reveals a symmetry that leaves no overlap: