Wade-Giles Transcription
The
first persons to create a standard transscription of Chinese were T.F.
Wade (d. 1895) and H.A. Giles (d. 1935). Their system called Wade-Giles
(chin.: Wei Tuoma shi pinyin 威妥瑪式拼音)
is quite correct in reflecting the vowels (like "yüen" for [jy
n]),
but is very complicated in the manner of reflecting consonants. Wade and
Giles saw the hard sound "k" as a soft one and added an
apostroph to express hard pronunciation: [g
an]
is written "kuan", [k
an]
is written k'uan. The sound [
]
(the french "j") is written "j", the sound [ç]
is "hs". A great problem to find a word in an index is that the
Wade-Giles system makes no difference between the consonants [tç]
and [t
]
- both "ch'", [d
]
and [dj], both "ch". Only in their syllable context, these
sounds are recognizable as two different sounds: the vowel-less syllables
are added by an "ih", like "ch'ih" for [t
]
and "chih" for [d
].
The syllables [tçi] and [dji] are written "ch'i" resp.
"chi". The syllables [dz] and [dzu] are written "tzu"
resp. "tsu".
The tone pitches are marked by one of four numbers added to the
transsciption, like hsiao3. In spite of these shortcomings, the
transscription system Wade-Giles has been used for a long time and has
been very widespread, especially in the United States where it is still
used today by Sinologists.
The table below gives an overview over the Wade-Giles transscription of
the Chinese sounds, the brackets include the pronunciation according to
the international sound transscription, after the brackets Wade-Giles.
[b]
p |
[d]
t |
[g]
k |
[dj]
ch |
[d
|
[dz]
ts, tz |
[p]
p' |
[t]
t' |
[k]
k' |
[tç]
ch' |
[t
|
[ts]
ts', tz' |
[m]
m |
[n]
n |
[x,
h] h |
[ç]
hs |
[
|
[s]
s |
[f]
f |
[l]
l |
|
|
[
|
|
The
vowel-less syllables [d
][t
][
][
],[dz][ts][s]
are written chih, ch'ih, shih, jih, tzû, tz'û, szû. The
simple vowels [i][u][y] are written i, wu, yü. The syllables of
two-syllable words are separated by a dash: "Chung-kuo".
|
[a] |
[o] |
[ə] |
[ε] |
[ai] |
[ei] |
[aω] |
[ou] |
[an] |
[ən] |
[aŋ] |
[əŋ] |
[uŋ] |
[ər] |
[-i] |
[-ja] |
|
|
[-jε] |
|
|
[-jaω] |
[-jou] |
[-jεn] |
[-in] |
[-iaŋ] |
[-iŋ] |
[-juŋ] |
|
[-u] |
[-ωa] |
[-ωo] |
|
|
[-ωai] |
[-ωei] |
|
|
[-ωan] |
[-un] |
[-ωaŋ] |
[-ωəŋ] |
|
|
[-y] |
|
|
|
[-yε] |
|
|
|
|
[-yεn] |
[-yn] |
|
|
|
|

[Last Modified By Admin, at 2006-01-05 09:04:57]
