Romanization of Chinese

Romanization of Chinese is the practice of converting Chinese characters into the Latin script used in Western languages. Chinese dialects are logosyllabic, a form of language that uses characters to represent words or syllables. The language consists of tens of thousands of characters, making translation into the twenty-six-letter Latin alphabet problematic. Romanization systems use phonetic spellings to translate Chinese characters into Latin letters. While there are many romanization systems, only two are widely used.

Background

Chinese is the oldest living language on Earth, dating back more than three thousand years. While the Chinese refer to their language as a single language, it actually consists of seven dialect groups. The largest is Mandarin, which is spoken by about 70 percent of the population and is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. All Chinese dialects are logosyllabic and use characters instead of letters to represent sounds, words, and syllables. There are an estimated fifty-five thousand characters in the Chinese language, and many syllables can be represented by more than one character.

Early attempts to romanize the Chinese language were made by European traders who had contact with the Chinese in the thirteenth century. Despite some trade with the West, medieval China was a closed society and did not readily allow foreigners inside its borders. In the early seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries were allowed to enter the country. One of those missionaries, an Italian priest named Matteo Ricci, studied Chinese and began translating it into the Latin alphabet. Ricci used the Latin language as a base for his translations because it was widely used by missionaries and priests of the time. For example, the Chinese philosopher Kong Fuzi, who lived in the sixth century B.C.E., was given the Latin-influenced name Confucius, a title that has remained in use into the modern era. A few years after Ricci's death, another missionary, Nicolas Trigault, introduced a twenty-nine-character Latin alphabet for transcribing Chinese.

As Western contact with China increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several other romanization systems were implemented, building on the work of the Jesuit missionaries. In 1867, British diplomat and scholar Thomas Francis Wade developed a romanization system for a textbook on Mandarin Chinese in English. In 1912, another British diplomat Herbert Allen Giles, refined Wade's work, creating what became known as the Wade-Giles system. Wade-Giles became the accepted international standard for romanization of Chinese for most of the next century.

Up until the twentieth century, most romanization systems were created by Westerners to make the Chinese translations easier for foreigners to understand. In 1913, Chinese linguists developed their own system for phonetically transcribing Mandarin into Latin script. This system, which consisted of thirty-seven Latin characters and four tonal marks, was officially called Zhùyīn fúhào, but became better known as Bopomofo after its first four symbols. With the growth of Chinese communism in the 1920s, party leaders began to see romanization as a way to unify the country and increase the spread of education and ideology. In 1928, the Committee for National Language introduced a system known as Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the first official romanization accepted by the Chinese government. Instead of using marks to indicate different tones in Chinese, the system varied the spellings of words.

In 1949, after years of civil war, Communist forces gained control of the mainland and established the People's Republic of China. As part of an effort to standardize the nation's language and culture, Chinese officials authorized the creation of a new romanization system. The system, called Hànyŭ Pīnyīn, or Pinyin, was introduced in 1958. It was created from Gwoyeu Romatzyh and another system developed by scholars in the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, Pinyin replaced the Wade-Giles system as the accepted form of romanization by the United Nations and the International Organization for Standardization.

Overview

While Pinyin has become the more commonly accepted system in the twenty-first century, Wade-Giles is still widely used in Taiwan and many places outside of China. One of the main differences between the two is that Wade-Giles was implemented for all Chinese dialects and is considered the more complicated of the systems. Pinyin focuses on the Mandarin dialect, as that is the official and most spoken language in the country.

Both systems use many of the same Latin letters but use different ones to represent the same Chinese sound. For example, Wade-Giles uses the characters ch or ch' to express sounds that Pinyin represents with j, q, zh, or ch. The apostrophe in Wade-Giles represents an aspiration sound similar to the slight puff of air when saying the letter p in the word pot. The system also uses hyphens to separate some syllables and marks changes in tone with a superscript, or small number printed above the line. Taiwan's capital of Taipei, for example, would be written in Wade-Giles as T'ai²-pei³.

Other differences include the exclusive use of letter combinations such as hs or ts to begin syllables in Wade-Giles, while only Pinyin begins syllables with b, d, g, q, x, or z. Conversely, Wade-Giles syllables can end with ung, ueh, or ieh; in Pinyin, these endings become ong, ue, and ie. One of the most famous illustrations of the difference is the name of the former Communist leader of China at the time of the 1949 revolution. Pinyin spells his name as Mao Zedong, while under Wade-Giles it would be Mao Tse-tung. Other notable uses of the two systems can be found in the religious philosophy of Taoism (Wade-Giles) or Daoism (Pinyin); and the name of the dynasty that ruled China from 1644 to 1912—Qing (Pinyin) or Ch'ing (Wade-Giles).

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