WadeâÂÂGiles 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 ChineseâÂÂEnglish Dictionary (1892).
The romanization systems in common use until the late 19th century were based on the Nanjing dialect, but WadeâÂÂGiles 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, WadeâÂÂGiles 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 WadeâÂÂGiles derived romanized form, for example Kaohsiung, the Matsu Islands and Chiang Ching-kuo.
WadeâÂÂGiles 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 ' () in 1867, the first textbook on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin in English, which became the basis for the system later known as WadeâÂÂGiles. The system, designed to transcribe Chinese terms for Chinese specialists, was further refined in 1892 by Herbert Giles (in A ChineseâÂÂEnglish Dictionary), a British diplomat in China, and his son Lionel Giles, a curator at the British Museum.
Taiwan used WadeâÂÂGiles 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). Under Ma Ying-jeou's Kuomintang (KMT)-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 WadeâÂÂGiles system, as well as the other aforementioned systems.
The tables below show the WadeâÂÂGiles representation of each Chinese sound (in bold type), together with the corresponding IPA phonetic symbol (in square brackets), and equivalent representations in Bopomofo and Hanyu Pinyin.
Instead of ts, ts and s, WadeâÂÂGiles writes tz, tz and ss before à  (see below).
WadeâÂÂGiles 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.
WadeâÂÂGiles 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 -Ã Â, see below.
Giles's A ChineseâÂÂEnglish Dictionary also includes the finals -io (in yo, chio, chio, hsio, lio and nio) and -üo (in chüo, chüo, hsüo, lüo and nüo), both of which are pronounced -üeh in modern Standard Chinese: yüeh, chüeh, chüeh, hsüeh, lüeh and nüeh.
WadeâÂÂGiles writes the syllable as i or yi depending on the character.
A feature of the WadeâÂÂGiles 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 ( or ), borrowed from the polytonic orthography of the Ancient Greek language. Herbert Giles and others used a left (opening) curved single quotation mark (âÂÂ) 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 (which has a full set of voiced consonants) and Min Nan (Hà Â-ló-oÃÂ) whose century-old PeÃÂh-à Âe-jë (POJ, often called Missionary Romanization) is similar to WadeâÂÂGiles. POJ, Legge romanization, Simplified Wade, and EFEO Chinese transcription use the letter 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 to denote aspiration is also found in romanizations of other Asian languages, such as McCuneâÂÂReischauer for Korean and ISO 11940 for Thai.
People unfamiliar with WadeâÂÂGiles 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:
Like Yale and Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, WadeâÂÂGiles renders the two types of syllabic consonant (; WadeâÂÂGiles: kung<sup>1</sup>-yün<sup>4</sup>; Hanyu Pinyin: kà Ângyùn) differently:
These finals are both written as -ih in Tongyong Pinyin, as -i in Hanyu Pinyin (hence distinguishable only by the initial from as in li), and as -y in Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Simplified Wade. They are typically omitted in Bopomofo.
Final o in WadeâÂÂGiles 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 (at the time WadeâÂÂGiles was developed). Specifically, after velar initials k, k and h (and a historical ng, which had been dropped by the time WadeâÂÂGiles was developed), o is used; for example, "Ã¥ÂÂ¥" is ko<sup>1</sup> (Pinyin gÃÂ) and "å»" is ko<sup>4</sup> (Pinyin kè). In Peking dialect, o after velars (and what used to be ng) have shifted to , thus they are written as ge, ke, he and e in Pinyin. When forms a syllable on its own, WadeâÂÂGiles 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 WadeâÂÂGiles, except for wo, shuo (e.g. "說" shuo<sup>1</sup>) and the three syllables of kuo, kuo, and huo (as in éÂÂ, éÂÂ, etc.), which contrast with ko, ko, and ho that correspond to Pinyin ge, ke, and he. This is because characters like ç¾ , å¤Â, etc. (WadeâÂÂGiles: lo<sup>2</sup>, to<sup>1</sup>; Pinyin: luó, duà Â) did not originally carry the medial . Peking dialect does not have phonemic contrast between o and -uo/wo (except in interjections when used alone) and a medial is usually inserted in front of -o to form .
Zhuyin and Pinyin write as ã -o after ã b, ã p, ã m and ã f, and as ã¨ã -uo after all other initials.
Tones are indicated in WadeâÂÂGiles using superscript numbers (1âÂÂ4) placed after the syllable. This contrasts with the use of diacritics to represent the tones in Pinyin. For example, the Pinyin qiàn (fourth tone) has the WadeâÂÂGiles equivalent chien<sup>4</sup>.
WadeâÂÂGiles uses hyphens to separate all syllables within a word (whereas Pinyin 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 WadeâÂÂGiles is actually "Tai-lun". (See also Chinese names.)
Note: In Hanyu Pinyin, the so-called neutral tone is written leaving the syllable with no diacritic mark at all. In Tongyong Pinyin, a ring is written over the vowel.
There are several adaptations of WadeâÂÂGiles.
The romanization system used in the 1943 edition of Mathews' ChineseâÂÂEnglish Dictionary differs from WadeâÂÂGiles in the following ways:
In Harold Shadick's A First Course in Literary Chinese, the following modifications are made to WadeâÂÂGiles:
The Chinese phrase æÂÂè¨ÂæÂÂå ¥é (Wên<sup>2</sup>-yen<sup>2</sup> wên<sup>2</sup> ju<sup>4</sup>-mên<sup>2</sup>) would thus be romanized as Wén-yén wén jù-mén.
This adaptation of WadeâÂÂGiles by Olov Anderson has several distinctive features, most notably the use of tonal spelling and the replacement of apostrophes with the letter â¨hâ©. For example, the aspirated consonants pû, tû and kû become ph, th and kh. Tones are marked by appending the silent letters â¨vâ©, â¨xâ© and â¨zâ© to a syllable. Additionally, à  is written as y, and circumflexes and -h are dropped in the final position.
Examples of WadeâÂÂGiles derived English language terminology: