EFEO Chinese transcription

The Chinese transcription system invented by the French School of the Far East was the most widely used in the French-speaking world until the mid-20th century. While it is often deemed to have been devised by Séraphin Couvreur, who was not an EFEO member, its actual creator was . It was superseded by Hanyu Pinyin.
The transcription of the EFEO did not borrow its phonetics from the national official Standard Chinese. Rather, it was synthesized independently to be a mean of Chinese dialects, and shows a state of sounds a little older in form. Hence, the phoneme, is transcribed as either or ; before the jian-tuan merger in contemporary Mandarin, i.e. the merger between the alveolar consonants and the alveolo-palatal consonants, before the high front vowels and.
Since EFEO makes use, to a large extent, of the phonetic values of Latin letters as used in French, the transcription of many Chinese syllables into the EFEO system is quite similar to how they were transcribed by French missionaries in the late 17th to 19th centuries ; for example, "Yanzhou Fou" is "Yen-tcheou-fou" in both cases. However, a few features distinguishes it from the early French missionary systems.