Wade–Giles

Wade–Giles is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from the system produced by Thomas Francis Wade during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert Giles's A Chinese–English Dictionary.
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. In mainland China, Wade–Giles has been mostly replaced by Hanyu Pinyin, 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 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, 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, Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, and Tongyong Pinyin. Under Ma Ying-jeou's Kuomintang -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, together with the corresponding IPA phonetic symbol, and equivalent representations in Bopomofo and Hanyu Pinyin.

Initials

Instead of ts, ts and s, Wade–Giles writes tz, tz and ss before ŭ.

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 and -üo, 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, borrowed from the polytonic orthography of the Ancient Greek language. Herbert Giles and others used a left 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 and Min Nan whose century-old Pe̍h-ōe-jī 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.. 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 and ch are always before either ü or i, but never ih.
The retroflex ch and 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 differently:

-ŭ is used after the sibilants written in this position as tz, tz and ss.
-ih is used after the retroflex ch, ch, sh, and j.

These finals are both written as -ih in Tongyong Pinyin, as -i in Hanyu Pinyin, 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. Specifically, after velar initials k, k and h, o is used; for example, "哥" is ko¹ and "刻" is ko⁴. In Peking dialect, o after velars 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 and the three syllables of kuo, kuo, and huo, which contrast with ko, ko, and ho that correspond to Pinyin ge, ke, and he. This is because characters like 羅, 多, etc. did not originally carry the medial. Peking dialect does not have phonemic contrast between o and -uo/''wo and a medial is usually inserted in front of -o to form.
IPA
Wade–Giles po pʻo mo fo to tʻo no lo ko kʻo ho cho chʻo jo tso tsʻo so o/ê wo
Zhuyin ㄅㄛㄆㄛㄇㄛㄈㄛㄉㄨㄛㄊㄨㄛㄋㄨㄛㄌㄨㄛㄍㄜㄎㄜㄏㄜㄓㄨㄛㄔㄨㄛㄖㄨㄛㄗㄨㄛㄘㄨㄛㄙㄨㄛㄜㄨㄛ
Pinyin bo po mo fo duo tuo nuo luo ge ke he zhuo chuo ruo zuo cuo suo e wo

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

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

Tone	Sample text	Hanyu Pinyin	Wade–Giles
1. high	s=妈	mā	s=
2. rising	labels=no; l=hemp	má	s=
3. low	s=马	mǎ	s=
4. falling	s=骂	mà	s=
5. neutral	s=吗;	ma	s=

Punctuation

Wade–Giles uses hyphens to separate all syllables within a word.
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".