Wade-Giles

The Wade-Giles system of Romanisation of Chinese characters (rendering Chinese characters in Roman - ie western - letters) was devised in the nineteenth century and was the main method used for most of the twentieth century. In recent decades it has been replaced to a significant degree in popular use by the Pinyin system, devised by scholars in the People's Republic of China in the 1950s. However, the Wade-Giles system is still used in Taiwan and by most diasporic Chinese, especially Chinese Christians.

The system was first devised in 1859 by Sir Thomas Francis Wade (1818-1895), a British army officer who had served in the first Opium War (1839-42) and who in 1845 became a student interpreter in China. The system was modified in 1892 by Herbert Giles (1845-1935) and acquired its double-barrelled name.

Among the drawbacks of the system are that pronunciation of certain consonants is only obvious to the initiated. In Wade-Giles, P is pronounced as the letter B; P' is P. Likewise K is pronounced J and K' is pronounced K Thus the place name transliterated at Peking was always intended be pronounced Be(i) Jing (as in the Pinyin Beijing)rather than Pea-king. These anomalies, and very many others, are not present in the Pinyin system which, for English-speakers at any rate, gives a much more accurate version of the Chinese words.

However, these characteristics of Wade-Giles also have their advantages. Phonemes which differ only in aspiration are spelled with the same basic letter. Since Chinese always treats these pairs as phonologically identical (in terms of which vowels and consonants they can co-occur with), this system is more linguistically accurate than Pinyin, which uses different basic symbols for these phoneme pairs. In many cases, the orthography used by Wade-Giles for dipthongs is also more phonetically accurate than the pinyin alternative. Consequently, most linguists prefer Wade-Giles rather than Pinyin.