Wade-Giles Romanization

Wade-Giles romanization, system of romanizing the modern Chinese written language, originally devised to simplify Chinese-language characters for the Western world. Initiated by Sir Thomas Francis Wade, the system was modified by the University of Cambridge professor Herbert Allen Giles in his Chinese-English Dictionary (1912). With Giles’s syllabic changes, Wade-Giles became the preferred Chinese transliteration system among both academics and nonspecialists in English-speaking countries and was interpreted into Danish, Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. The Chinese themselves experimented with several systems to transcribe local expressions for non-Chinese publications, but in mainland China these were all replaced officially in 1979 by the clearer Pinyin romanization system. Wade-Giles continued to be used on the island of Taiwan, although a modified system that was orthographically somewhat between Pinyin and Wade-Giles has been in limited use there since about 2000.

Although valued for its contribution to Chinese language reform, Wade-Giles romanization is thought to be confusing compared with more recent systems. Based on pronunciation from nonstandardized speech sounds, the Wade-Giles system contains like symbols representing different sounds (e.g., Pinyin j, q, zh, and ch are rendered in Wade-Giles as ch and ch’), and different symbols expressing the same sound (ts and tz for Pinyin z). Tone changes are indicated by numbers written above the line (tu²), aspirations and phoneme separations are marked by apostrophes (t’a’), and middle-vowel variations are distinguished by additional accents (êrh). Printers often eliminate diacritical marks, sometimes confusing the meaning. The system documents 407 monosyllables and polysyllables. Westerners studying Chinese based on the Wade-Giles system find the syllabic subdivisions into monosyllables a distortion of word flow that is only confounded by the numerous intact accents.