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Wade–Giles (/ˌweɪd ˈdʒaɪlz/ WAYD JYLZ) is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Francis Wade, during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert A. Giles's Chinese–English Dictionary of 1892.

The romanization systems in common use until the late 19th century were based on the Nanjing dialect, but Wade–Giles was based on the Beijing dialect and was the system of transcription familiar in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century. Both of these kinds of transcription were used in postal romanizations (romanized place-names standardized for postal uses). In mainland China Wade–Giles has been mostly replaced by the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system, which was officially adopted in 1958, with exceptions for the romanized forms of some of the most commonly used names of locations and persons, and other proper nouns. The romanized name for most locations, persons and other proper nouns in Taiwan is based on the Wade–Giles derived romanized form, for example Kaohsiung, the Matsu Islands and Chiang Ching-kuo.

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 Cambridge University. Wade published in 1867 the first textbook on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin in English, Yü-yen Tzŭ-erh Chi (traditional Chinese: 語言自邇集; simplified Chinese: 语言自迩集),^[2] which became the basis for the romanization system later known as Wade–Giles. The system, designed to transcribe Chinese terms for Chinese specialists, was further refined in 1892 by Herbert Allen Giles (in A Chinese–English Dictionary), a British diplomat in China and his son, Lionel Giles,^{[citation needed]} a curator at the British Museum.^[3]

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 party has previously promoted Pinyin with Ma Ying-jeou's successful presidential bid in 2008 and in a number of cities with Kuomintang elected mayors. However, the current Tsai Ing-wen administration and Democratic Progressive Party 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.

Initials and finals

The tables below show the Wade–Giles representation of each Chinese sound (in bold type),^[4] together with the corresponding IPA phonetic symbol (in square brackets), and equivalent representations in Bopomofo and Hanyu Pinyin.

Initials

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

Finalsedit

		Coda
		∅			/i/		/u/		/n/		/ŋ/			/ɻ/
Medial	∅	ih/ŭ ɨ ㄭ -i	ê/o ɤ ㄜ e	a a ㄚ a	ei ei ㄟ ei	ai ai ㄞ ai	ou ou ㄡ ou	ao au ㄠ ao	ên ən ㄣ en	an an ㄢ an	ung ʊŋ ㄨㄥ ong	êng əŋ ㄥ eng	ang aŋ ㄤ ang	êrh aɚ̯ ㄦ er
	/j/	i i ㄧ i	ieh je ㄧㄝ ie	ia ja ㄧㄚ ia			iu jou ㄧㄡ iu	iao jau ㄧㄠ iao	in in ㄧㄣ in	ien jɛn ㄧㄢ ian	iung jʊŋ ㄩㄥ iong	ing iŋ ㄧㄥ ing	iang jaŋ ㄧㄤ iang
	?pojem=	u u ㄨ u	o/uo wo ㄛ/ㄨㄛ o/uo	ua wa ㄨㄚ ua	ui/uei wei ㄨㄟ ui	uai wai ㄨㄞ uai			un wən ㄨㄣ un	uan wan ㄨㄢ uan			uang waŋ ㄨㄤ uang
	/ɥ/	ü y ㄩ ü	üeh ɥe ㄩㄝ üe						ün yn ㄩㄣ ün	üan ɥɛn ㄩㄢ üan

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

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

Wade–Giles writes -wo as -uo after kʻ, k, h and sh, otherwise as -o: kʻuo, kuo, huo, shuo, bo, tso. After chʻ, it is written chʻo or chʻuo depending on the character.

For -ih and -ŭ, see below.

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

Syllables that begin with a medialedit

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

System featuresedit

Consonants and initial symbolsedit

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 (ʽ or ʻ), 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, pʻ, t, tʻ, k, kʻ, ch, chʻ. 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 ⟨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 ⟨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 chʻ (Pīnyīn q) are always before either ü or i, but never ih.
• The retroflex ch (Pīnyīn zh) and chʻ (Pīnyīn ch) are always before ih, a, ê, e, o, or u.

Vowels and final symbolsedit

Syllabic consonantsedit

Like Yale and Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, Wade–Giles renders the two types of syllabic consonant (simplified Chinese: 空韵; traditional Chinese: 空韻; Wade–Giles: kʻung¹-yün⁴; Hànyǔ Pīnyīn: kōngyùn) differently:

• -ŭ is used after the sibilants written in this position (and this position only) as tz, tzʻ and ss (Pīnyīn z, c and s).
• -ih is used after the retroflex ch, chʻ, 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 i as in li), and as -y in Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Simplified Wade. They are typically omitted in Zhùyīn (Bōpōmōfō).

Vowel oedit

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

What is pronounced in vernacular Peking dialect as a close-mid back unrounded vowel 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, kʻ 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 kʻo^4[5] (Pīnyīn kè). In Peking dialect, o after velars (and what used to be ng) have shifted to ɤ, thus they are written as ge, ke, he and e in Pīnyīn. When 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 wo is usually written as o in Wade–Giles, except for wo, shuo (e.g. "說" shuo¹) and the three syllables of kuo, kʻuo, and huo (as in 過, 霍, etc.), which contrast with ko, kʻo, 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 w. Peking dialect does not have phonemic contrast between o and -uo/wo (except in interjections when used alone) and a medial w is usually inserted in front of -o to form wo.

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

Tonesedit

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 chʻien⁴.

Punctuationedit

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.)

Comparison with other systemsedit

Pinyinedit

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

Chartedit