Wade–Giles#Empty rime

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 {{lang|zh-Latn-wadegile|Yü-yen Tzŭ-erh Chi}} ({{zhi|first=t|t=語言自邇集|s=语言自迩集}}){{Cite book |last=Wade |first=Thomas Francis |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Fu0aAAAAYAAJ |title=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 |publisher=Trübner |year=1867 |location=London |language=zh}} in 1867, the first textbook on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin in English,{{Cite book |last=Kaske |first=Elisabeth |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=okhrBBmnHVQC |title=The Politics of Language in Chinese Education: 1895–1919 |publisher=Brill |year=2008 |isbn=978-9-004-16367-6 |page=68}} 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,{{citation needed|date=September 2016}} a curator at the British Museum.{{Cite web |title=Chinese Language Transliteration Systems – Wade–Giles |url=http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/skozerow/wadegiles.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070128065433/http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/skozerow/wadegiles.htm |archive-date=2007-01-28 |access-date=2007-08-04 |publisher=UCLA film and television archive}} (Web archive)

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). The Kuomintang (KMT) has previously promoted pinyin with Ma Ying-jeou's successful presidential bid in 2008 and in a number of cities with Kuomintang mayors.{{Citation needed|date=November 2024}} However, the Tsai Ing-wen administration and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) along with the majority of the people in Taiwan, both native and overseas, use spelling and transcribe their legal names based on the Wade–Giles system, as well as the other aforementioned systems.{{Citation needed|date=November 2024}}

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

Instead of ts, ts{{wg-apos}} and s, Wade–Giles writes tz, tz{{wg-apos}} and ss before ŭ (see below).

Wade–Giles writes -uei after k{{wg-apos}} and k, otherwise -ui: k{{wg-apos}}uei, kuei, hui, shui, ch{{wg-apos}}ui.

It writes {{IPA|[-ɤ]}} as -o after k{{wg-apos}}, k and h, otherwise as -ê: k{{wg-apos}}o, ko, ho, shê, ch{{wg-apos}}ê. When {{IPA|[ɤ]}} forms a syllable on its own, it is written ê or o depending on the character.

Wade–Giles writes {{IPA|[-wo]}} as -uo after k{{wg-apos}}, k, h and sh, otherwise as -o: k{{wg-apos}}uo, kuo, huo, shuo, bo, tso. After ch{{wg-apos}}, it is written ch{{wg-apos}}o or ch{{wg-apos}}uo depending on the character.

For -ih and -ŭ, see below.

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

Wade–Giles writes the syllable {{IPA|[i]}} as i or yi depending on the character.

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 ({{asper}} or {{wg-apos}}), 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{{wg-apos}}, t, t{{wg-apos}}, k, k{{wg-apos}}, ch, ch{{wg-apos}}. 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 {{angbr|h}} 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 {{angbr|h}} 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. Hànyǔ Pīnyīn 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 Hànyǔ Pīnyīn 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 (Pīnyīn j) and ch{{wg-apos}} (Pīnyīn q) are always before either ü or i, but never ih.
• The retroflex ch (Pīnyīn zh) and ch{{wg-apos}} (Pīnyīn ch) are always before ih, a, ê, e, o, or u.

Like Yale and Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, Wade–Giles renders the two types of syllabic consonant ({{lang-zh|s=空韵|t=空韻}}; Wade–Giles: k{{wg-apos}}ung¹-yün⁴; Hànyǔ Pīnyīn: kōngyùn) differently:

• -ŭ is used after the sibilants written in this position (and this position only) as tz, tz{{wg-apos}} and ss (Pīnyīn z, c and s).
• -ih is used after the retroflex ch, ch{{wg-apos}}, sh, and j (Pīnyīn zh, ch, sh, and r).

These finals are both written as -ih in Tongyòng Pinyin, as -i in Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (hence distinguishable only by the initial from {{IPA|[i]}} as in li), and as -y in Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Simplified Wade. They are typically omitted in Zhùyīn (Bōpōmōfō).

Final o in Wade–Giles has two pronunciations in modern Peking dialect: {{IPA|[wo]}} and {{IPA|[ɤ]}}.

What is pronounced in vernacular Peking dialect as a close-mid back unrounded vowel {{IPA|[ɤ]}} 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{{wg-apos}} 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 (Pīnyīn gē) and "刻" is k{{wg-apos}}o⁴A Chinese–English Dictionary, p. 761. (Pīnyīn kè). In Peking dialect, o after velars (and what used to be ng) have shifted to {{IPA|[ɤ]}}, thus they are written as ge, ke, he and e in Pīnyīn. When {{IPA|[ɤ]}} 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 {{IPA|[wo]}} is usually written as o in Wade–Giles, except for wo, shuo (e.g. "說" shuo¹) and the three syllables of kuo, k{{wg-apos}}uo, and huo (as in 過, 霍, etc.), which contrast with ko, k{{wg-apos}}o, and ho that correspond to Pīnyīn ge, ke, and he. This is because characters like 羅, 多, etc. (Wade–Giles: lo², to¹; Pīnyīn: luó, duō) did not originally carry the medial {{IPA|[w]}}. Peking dialect does not have phonemic contrast between o and -uo/wo (except in interjections when used alone) and a medial {{IPA|[w]}} is usually inserted in front of -o to form {{IPA|[wo]}}.

Zhùyīn and Pīnyīn write {{IPA|[wo]}} as ㄛ -o after ㄅ b, ㄆ p, ㄇ m and ㄈ f, and as ㄨㄛ -uo after all other initials.

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 Pīnyīn. For example, the Pīnyīn qiàn (fourth tone) has the Wade–Giles equivalent ch{{wg-apos}}ien⁴.

{{notelist}}

Wade–Giles uses hyphens to separate all syllables within a word (whereas Pīnyīn 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.)

• Wade–Giles chose the French-like {{Grapheme|j}} (implying a sound like IPA's {{IPAblink|ʒ}}, as in s in English measure) to represent a Northern Mandarin pronunciation of what is represented as {{Grapheme|r}} in pinyin (Northern Mandarin {{IPAblink|ʐ}}/ Southern Mandarin {{IPAc-cmn|r}}; generally considered allophones).
• Ü (representing {{IPAslink|y}}) always has an umlaut above, while pinyin only employs it in the cases of {{Transliteration|zh|pinyin|nü}}, {{Transliteration|zh|pinyin|nüe}}, {{Transliteration|zh|pinyin|lü}}, {{Transliteration|zh|pinyin|lüe}} and {{Transliteration|zh|pinyin|lüan}}, while leaving it out after j, q, x and y as a simplification because {{Grapheme|u}}/{{IPAblink|u}} cannot otherwise appear after those letters. (The vowel {{Grapheme|u}}/{{IPAblink|u}} can occur in those cases in pinyin where the diaeresis are indicated {{Grapheme|ü}}/{{IPAblink|y}} or {{IPAblink|ɥ}}; in which cases it serves to distinguish the front vowel {{IPAblink|y}} from the back vowel {{IPAblink|u}}. By contrast it is always present to mark the front vowel in Wade–Giles.) Because {{Transliteration|zh|pinyin|yü}} (as in {{Lang|zh-Hani|玉}} "jade") must have an umlaut in Wade–Giles, the umlaut-less {{Transliteration|zh|wadegile|yu}} in Wade–Giles is freed up for what corresponds to {{Transliteration|zh|pinyin|you}} ({{Lang|zh-Hani|{{linktext|有}}}} "have"/"there is") in Pinyin.
• The Pīnyīn cluster {{Grapheme|-ong}} is {{Grapheme|-ung}} in Wade–Giles, reflecting the pronunciation of {{IPAblink|ʊ}} as in English book {{IPAc-en|b|U|k}}. (Compare kung¹-fu to {{Transliteration|zh|pinyin|gōngfu}} as an example.)
• After a consonant, both Wade–Giles and Pīnyīn use {{Grapheme|-iu}} and {{Grapheme|-un}} instead of the complete syllables: {{Grapheme|-iou}} and {{Grapheme|-uên}}/{{Grapheme|-uen}}.

{{Pinyintable}}

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

There are several adaptations of Wade–Giles.

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

• It uses the right apostrophe: p{{r-apos}}, t{{r-apos}}, k{{r-apos}}, ch{{r-apos}}, ts{{r-apos}}, tz{{r-apos}}ŭ; 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{{wg-apos}}, t{{wg-apos}}, k{{wg-apos}}, ch{{wg-apos}}, ts{{wg-apos}}, tz{{wg-apos}}ŭ.
• It consistently uses i for the syllable {{IPA|[i]}}, while Wade–Giles uses i or yi depending on the character.
• It uses o for the syllable {{IPA|[ɤ]}}, 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, ch{{wg-apos}}io, hsio, yo, replacing them with chüeh, ch{{wg-apos}}üeh, 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.

{{main|Wade–Giles table}}

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

{{Portal|Taiwan|China|Languages}}

• Comparison of Chinese transcription systems
• Simplified Wade
• Daoism–Taoism romanization issue
• Legge romanization
• Romanization of Chinese
• Cyrillization of Chinese

{{reflist}}

• 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. [https://archive.org/details/b31352583 Rev. & enlarged 2nd ed.] in 3 vols. ([https://archive.org/details/chineseenglishdi01gile/page/n9/mode/2up Vol. I: front-matter & a-hsü], [https://archive.org/details/chineseenglishdi02gile Vol. II: hsü-shao], and [https://archive.org/details/chineseenglishdi03gile 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.

• "[https://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/difference.html Library of Congress Pinyin Conversion Project Frequently Asked Questions What's the difference between Wade–Giles and Pinyin?]" – Library of Congress

{{Commons category|Wade–Giles}}

{{Wiktionary|Wade–Giles|Category:English terms derived from Wade–Giles}}

• [http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter.html Chinese Romanization Converter] – Convert between Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, Wade–Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh and other known or (un-)common Romanization systems.
• [https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/china.html A conversion table of Chinese provinces and cities from Wade–Giles to Pīnyīn]
• [http://pinyin4j.sourceforge.net/ Pinyin4j: Java library supporting Chinese to Wade–Giles] – Support Simplified and Traditional Chinese; Support most popular Romanization systems, including Hànyŭ Pīnyīn, Tongyòng Pinyin, Wade–Giles, MPS2, Yale and Gwoyeu Romatzyh; Support multiple pronunciations of a single character; Support customized output, such as ü or tone marks.
• [https://archive.org/details/ch00inesewithouttegilerich Chinese without a teacher, Chinese phrasebook by Herbert Giles with Romanization]
• [http://ctext.org/pinyin.pl?if=en Chinese Phonetic Conversion Tool] – Converts between Wade–Giles and other formats
• [http://mandarinspot.com/annotate?phs=wadegiles Wade–Giles Annotation] – Wade–Giles pronunciation and English definitions for Chinese text snippets or web pages.
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20100714072949/http://www.cybertranslator.idv.tw/pinyin/bopomofo.htm 國語拼音對照表] {{in lang|zh}}
• [https://books.google.com/books?id=s0HjAAAAMAAJ Key to Wade–Giles romanization of Chinese characters: November 1944] (Army Map Service)

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Category:Romanization of Chinese

Category:Writing systems introduced in 1892