Romanisation systems

1. The origins and the need for romanisation

Before May fourth movement in 1919, all serious writing in Chinese was in classical Chinese. This is basically a written language. Traditionally, speakers learned to read it in the pronunciation of their own dialects. Beginners learned their elementary vocabulary mainly by being taught to recite the traditional texts by a teacher. Later when they consulted a dictionary, they could learn the pronunciation of a character not yet learned through the pronunciation of characters which it was assumed that they would already know.

Booklets were also produced listing characters grouped according to their pronunciation. Each Chinese character is monosyllabic, the syllable consisting of an initial, a final and a tone. The traditional Chinese dictionaries indicated the pronunciation of a character by giving two further characters, the first with the same initial, and the second with the same final and tone. This was known as the fanqie (·´ ÇÐ ) method. Thus the pronunciation learnt was the dialectical pronunciation. Only officials needed to learn a common spoken language in addition to this. This was the so-called Guanhua (¹Ù »° ) or "the official speech", became known in English as the "language of the officials" and hence "mandarin". This common language depended on where the court happened to be established. Today, it is the sound system of Peking dialect that is used as the basis of the so-called "common speech" or putonghua (ÆÕ Í¨ »° ), Peking having been the capital since the early 15th century, except for a short period from 1928 to 1949.

The need for a romanisation system appeared only with the coming of the Jesuit missionaries. They developed a system for themselves, and for teaching those of their converts who were illiterate. Later, other Europeans developed their own systems, until a confusingly large variety of systems was in use among foreigners and the Chinese with whom they were in contact.

As a result of the military defeats and humiliations of the nineteenth century, the Chinese developed an immense inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West, which manifested itself in either boasting about the philosophical and moral superiority of Chinese traditional culture, or in a blind worship of everything Western and a consequent denigration of many important aspects of Chinese tradition, a Chinese version of the Australasian "cultural cringe". In language, this resulted in many people advocating the abandonment of the characters and their replacement by a system of romanisation. Prominent left-wing intellectuals advocating this included Qu Qiubai (öÄ Çó °× )and the so-called father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (³ Ѹ ). Even the conservative writer Hu Shi (ºú ÊÊ ) saw alphabetisation of the language as inevitable.

However, after 1949, the cultural implications of completely abandoning the traditional writing system turned out to be unacceptable, and alphabetisation took second place to character simplification. Romanisation came to be seen more as a linguistic tool for promoting national unity by standardisation of the pronunciation, than as an eventual replacement for the system of character writing. Romanisation also turned out to be an extremely useful tool for classification in dictionaries, reference works and as a data entry system for computers. Today, a romanisation system is useful mainly as a teaching aid and as a reference tool.

• As a teaching aid, it not only enables foreign learners to acquire a good standard pronunciation without having to have constant access to a spoken example.
• It is also an extremely valuable tool for teaching standard pronunciation to native dialect-speakers.

  A characteristic of the Chinese characters is that they convey meaning first and sound second. A Chinese reading Japanese kanji first recognises the meaning more or less instantaneously, and then has to try to recall its Japanese pronunciation, whereas a Japanese reading Chinese characters, sees the meaning first and then seeks to recall the Chinese pronunciation.

  A similar process occurs with us when reading arabic numerals. If you have learned to read another European language such as French, for instance, you will know that in reading aloud a written text in French, if you come to a sequence of numerical figures, it is invariably the English that comes to mind first, and you then have to consciously translate this into French. In the same way, Chinese dialect speakers seeing a Chinese character, first recognise the meaning followed by its dialectical pronunciation (this takes place almost instantaneously), and only then, if need be, do they then have to consciously think of the standard pronunciation. This not only slows down their reactions, but interference from their dialect tends to affect their pronunciation. Reading in romanisation forces dialect speakers to concentrate on the standard pronunciation from the outset, and so will usually result in a much better standard pronunciation.

• A further advantage of a standard romanisation system is that it enables both native and non-native speakers of Chinese to consult dictionaries and reference works with relative ease, and provides a extremely useful tool for teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages.
• For native-speakers, it has the added advantage of helping to promote national unity through standardising the pronunciation, so making communication through radio and television easier.
• It has also turned out to be very useful as a method for entering data into computers.

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2. Systems of romanisation

The two most useful systems that English-speakers need to be familiar with are:

• a: the Pinyin system and
• b: the Wade-Giles system

Other systems include:

• c: the Gwoyeu romatzyh system and
• d: the Yale system.
• e: EFEO system developed by the Ecole française de l'extrême-orient, which has long been in use in French publications
• f: systems developed for other foreign languages such as the sytem used in publications in Russian system based on the Russian cyrillic alphabet.
• g: a Chinese system is also widely used in Chinese-Chinese dictionaries in China, especially in those published before the 1960s, and also in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan publications. The symbols uses in this system are called zhuyin fuhao (×¢ Òô ·û ºÅ ) or "symbols for indicating pronunciation". Other names for the system are zhuyin zimu (×¢ Òô ×Ö Ä¸ ) or "alphabet for indicating the pronunciation", guoyin zimu (¹ú Òô ×Ö Ä¸ )or "alphabet for indicating the national pronunciation", and guoyin fuhao(¹ú Òô ·û ºÅ ) or "symbols for indicating the national pronunciation".

a: Pinyin

The Pinyin system of romanisation was officially adopted by the Peking government in 1958, and adopted later in Singapore and Malaysia as well. It has been adopted by the Bibliothèque nationale and French Universities since 1960s and by the British Library since 1964. However, American scholars rejected the system until 1978, when it was finally adopted the United Nations. It continued to be rejected by Taiwan writers for political reasons, because the system had been introduced by a Communist government. This attitude changed recently, when the Taiwan announced in July, 1999, its intention to adopt the system, stressing that this was a linguistic and not a political decision. Publications from universities such as Cambridge University also continue to reject it for reasons of conservatism, while an influential work such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica uses both the Pinyin system and the Wade-Giles system, but is not always consistent, sometimes using both system in the same article. For fuller information about the pinyin system, see details.

b: Wade-Giles

The Wade-Giles system is used mainly in English-speaking countries. It was developed in the nineteenth century by Thomas Wade, and modified by the first Professor of Chinese at Cambridge University, Herbert Giles. The main differences from the Pinyin system are:

• i. Its emphasis on aspiration and non-aspiration. Thus instead of using b and p for the unaspirated and aspirated unvoiced labials, it uses p and p'. Similarly, for the pinyin pairs d and t, it uses t and t', and for the pinyin g and k, it used k and k'.
• ii. It does not distinguish palatal and retroflex sounds, and so where pinyin used j for the unaspirated palatal, and zh for the unaspirated retroflex, the Wade-Giles system uses the single initial ch for both. For the corresponding aspirated sounds, pinyin uses q for the palatal sound, and ch for the retroflex sound, whereas Wade-Giles uses the single initial ch' for both. It is this use of a single symbol to denote two different sounds (palatal and retroflex) that makes it more difficult for English-speakers to dstinguish the sounds inChinese.
• iii. In the pinyin system, the syllables of polysyllabic words are joined together to form a single word, whereas in the Wade-Giles system, the syllables of polysyllabic words are hyphenated.
• iv. Instead of using tone-marks above a vowel, Wade-Giles places the number for the tone as a superscript after each syllable, or omits the tone-markings altogether.
• v. Because the Wade-Giles system was never an official standard many writers felt free to modify it in accordance with their individual views. Thus some writers used accents instead of number superscripts for the tones, some omitted the circumflex on e for the Wade-Giles ên and êng sounds. Although the pinyin system has been the official romanisation system in China since 1958, until 1978, many English language publications from China for the general reader used a modified Wade-Giles system in which the aspirate signs were omitted. Joseph Needham in his monumental work Science and Civilisation in China replaces aspirate sign of the Wade-Giles system by the letter h. Thus Needham writes ph for Wade-Giles p', the for Wade-Giles t' and writings based on his works have tended to follow suit.

Today, knowledge of the Wade-Giles system is needed for reading English language works published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, although the British Library in the UK, and Bibliothèque nationale in France have been using the Pinyin system since the 1960s, the American Library of Congress continues to use the Wade-Giles system, although pinyin has been the Chinese standard for half a century, and the international standard now for nearly a quarter of a century. Consquently, research workers still need to know both systems, since books in Chinese in most NZ libraries are classifed following the Library of Congress, rather than the British Library.

c: Gwoyeu Romatzyh

The Gwoyeu Romatzyh system was proposed by Chinese government in 1928, but was never ratified. Nevertheless, it has had a certain influence outside China through being adopted by the Universities of London, Harvard, Melbourne. The system was used by publications from these Universities, and also from Universities staffed by scholars trained at these Universities. It was for a long time the system favoured at Auckland University, for example, and is used in some important publications on classical Chinese from Toronto University. One of its main promoters was the famous American Chinese linguist Yuen Ren CHAO (in Pinyin ZHAO Yuanren), who uses it in his textbook Mandarin Primer and in his authoritative work A Grammar of Modern Chinese. The main thing that distinguishes it from other systems is its use of a different spelling for each of the four tones. It is argued that remembering a different spelling is easier than trying to remember different tone marks or different number superscripts.

d: Yale

This system is very similar to the pinyin system. Its is important because of the influential because of the teaching texts published by Yale University where the system was developed. A modified form of it also tends to be used by those Taiwan authors who do not use a modified Wade-Giles system.

e: other systems

Non-English speaking countries all tend to have their own systems of romanisation. Thus the French used to use the EFEO system, while the Germans, Spanish, Italians, Russians, all had their systems. For people studying China who needed to use bibliographic and other material in other languages. This was a major headache, which has largely disappeared as a result of the adoption of pinyin as the international standard by the United Nations, though not, as already pointed out, by the Library of Congress.

f: The Chinese Zhuyin zimu system

A Chinese phonetic system, similar in principle to the Japanese kana system, was developed early in the twentieth century, and is still widely used in Taiwan and mainland publications. There is a symbol corresponding to every initial of the pinyin system, and a group of one or more symbols corresponding to every final of the pinyin system. The group of symbols representing the pronunciation of a syllable may be written horizontally or vertically. The tone marks are as in pinyin, but are placed above the last symbol of the group in horizontal writing, and after the last symbol of the group in vertical writing.

3. Further Reading:

RAMSEY, S. Robert: The languages of China, Princeton University Press, 340 pages, 1987, ISBN 0-691-06694-9 and ISBN 0-091-01468-X,

The pinyin system is used

• in all reference works that have been published on the mainland since 1958,
• is also used in publications from Singapore and Malaysia and
• in newspapers, magazines and journals that follow the international standard adopted by the United Nations.

To compare the systems, see the concordance for the pinyin and Wade-Giles systems, and correspondences between the pinyin and the Chinese zhuyin fuhao system given on this site.

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This page last revised: 6th January; 2001