Talk:Wade–Giles

message: This page lacks both details and links about the previous romanization systems: the apostrophy would make much more sense by considering the attempts of romanization started with the very first contacts, including people like the Italian-origin, Spanish-ruled, Latin-speaking Jesuit Matteo Ricci and friends. Comparing this to English by default sounds like a dangerous contemporary English-only culture biais.
Considering comtemporary Mandarin as the default language is also certainly true went looking at Wade's and Giles' goal, but it erases the fact that they were "standing on the shoulders" -- not of giants, but people who talked to and translated and learned from XVIIth century Chinese speakers.
A better "encyclopedic" approach might want to consider:
* a short description, with example and a rapid time frame;
* a full history of the system, starting with the first ever, and considering the main steps and debates;
* an emphasis on Wade and Giles contribution, that is what thy changed to the system, what questions they faced, what were both side transformations at that time;
* a conclusion where the reproaches to Wade, Giles and they system would have they full meaning -- as these would be understandable with a historical and linguistic approach;
* a full list of transcription, through a table, to make things clear: it is a coding for the Westerners issue (difficult because no language is stable) but not an actual Chinese language question (though with the importance of the Latin alphabet, it became more than that).
Having a systematic "History led us there; because of that, this changed." approach would make "Confucius", "Tao" and "Qi" (to summarize to the three most important words in Chinese) much more understandable. 84.5.34.215 00:55, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origins 

message: *See also m:Use_pinyin_not_Wade-Giles for some very old discussion threads in the early days of wikipedia.
The following was removed and replaced with the lamest excuse.
:The following is a strange blend of information, misinformation, and opinion. That's why I removed it. --BV
The Wade-Giles transliteration system blends /b/ with /p/, /d/ with /t/, /g/ with /k/.
In the native Bopomofo notation, Bo and Po are two distinct sounds, in fact, they are the FIRST two sounds of the phonetic system. Right after Bo Po Mo Fo are De Te Na La, obviously D and T are distinct as the 5th and 6th of the pronounciation system. Then followed by Ge Ke He, again G and K sounds are distinct as the 9th and 10th sounds. 
Wade and Giles specifically dropped the FIRST sounds out of the FIRST three groups of the phonetic symbols, namely Bo, De and Ge. These sounds were significant enough to be placed first in the native phonetic system. Yet they were omitted in the Mandarin to western transliteration system. It is hard to explain their intention. Some theorized that they simply pulled a cruel practical joke on the Chinese language. What better way to make fun of a language than to remove the most important sounds? It is like removing ABC from the English alphabet. 
I totally don't buy the excuse that the Mandarin BoPoMoFo were replaced with some P'oPoMoFo notation because some aspired and unaspired B and P sounds.  To me, it just sound like the linguists were trying to make an excuse for Wade and Giles.  It would be the biggest scandal if the joke was not covered up with some lame excuses. Given pinyin, everyone in the world now knows that B sounds closer to P' in representing the Bo sound in Mandarin regardless of the voicing and aspire argument.
:I guess that's because you don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps you should learn something about phonetics? --BV
Despite the archane explanation that loaded with lingust jargons, P'o is no Bo, T'e is no De, K'e is no Ge to anyone who speaks native Mandarin.  
:Big fat duh. That's because those are the pinyin transliterations, which are more useful and accurate for non-linguists unfamiliar with the use of the apostrophe as an aspiration marker, and are tought to most people who speak native Mandarin, as well as most people who learn it as a second language. That's why Wade-Giles is being driven into well-deserved obscurity. --Brion VIBBER, Monday, April 1, 2002
I strongly believed the Wade-Giles system was intended as a joke or an insult, but no-one knew enough of both languages to get the joke at the time.
Then it was accepted as a de facto standard for over hundred of years because there was no better alternative.
Of course when Wade and Giles got their fame, they wouldn't be stupid enough to ruin their own names by explaining the cruel practical joke.
It is a sad thing that much of the Western knowledge of China was recorded based on such a malice.
Despite worldwide recognition of this transliteration system, it is piece of junk in my opinion.
Remember this was done at a time when the westerners called Chinese people Ching Chong and other funny names.
Yes, I admit that I am strongly opinionated and I pay absolutely no respect to this Wade-Giles thing because I actually considered it an insult to all the Chinese people.  Let's dig these two guys out of their grave and use pinyin!   -- User:Kowloonese
Well said. You know that there's not an ounce of decency left in this world when "何" is regarded to as "ho". :D -Taoster
:And I believe everybody also knows that "hs" sounds much more like the ㄒ sound (as in 西) than, of all things, "x"! Of course one had to understand the least bit about languages and phonetics to get Wade-Giles. If you knew French (I know I expect too much, but there are more Western languages than English...), anyways, if you knew French you would see that pinyin B is almost exactly the soft unaspirated P of, for example, "Paris".
:And none of my (non Chinese) friends ever spoke 學期 as "ksue-kwi" when I gave them a Wade-Giles text.--Laca 15:11, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: All right, Traditional-Chinese guy, in Wade-Giles it's actually "hsyue2-chi1" (xué qī). And yes Taoster, it is a complete insult to Chinese. I wonder what they were thinking... (writing XinJiang as SinKiang, Beijing as Peiching, Guanzhou as Canton, etc., etc...) Note: And I'm not ethnic-Chinese at all...--Metawe (talk) 02:59, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cat fight 

message: I can't find any explanation (other than the commercial clones of this very page) on the internet for "empty rime". Maybe it comes under some other name, but that would not be "empty rhyme" either. Put a page in Wikipedia, and link to it from the phrase on the Wade-Giles page, please. --Sobolewski 02:11, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Empty Rime?

message: This wade-giles thing is just wrong phonetics. For example, the /zh/ sound in Pinyin should be pronounced /dʒ/ not /ch/. Also the /j/ sound should be pronounced /z/ not /dʒ/. The stupidity of the English inventor is just beyond people's immagination.
:Ermm..... no. <zh> in pinyin is unvoiced and unaspirated, while <ch> is unvoiced and aspirated. Neither of them corresponds to the voiced /dʒ/ sound that begins <jam> in English. In IPA, /j/ represents the first phoneme of <yes> in English, not <jam>. Also, there is no /z/ sound in standard Putonghua. <j> in Mandarin is a voiceless unaspirated alveolo-palatal affricate, while /z/ in English is a voiced alveolar fricative. The two sound quite different actually. -- ran (talk) 19:56, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You are wrong in believing that voiced consonants are always voiced in English! So stop attacking the OP! --2.245.118.79 (talk) 20:47, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wrong Phonetics 

message: I posted a question on Talk:Tien_Gow for over a year regarding some Chinese words.  It was never answered.  Can someone who knows Wade-Giles offer some help?  Kowloonese 21:11, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I can help you--Metawe (talk) 03:03, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need help on WG to pinyin mapping 

message: Although frequently improperly called "transliteration", Wade-Giles' system is a transcription of Chinese, as there can be no transliteration of Chinese script into any phonetic script, like the Latin (or English) alphabet. Any system of romanization of Chinese renders the sounds (pronunciation) and not the characters (written form).
NoychoH 09:09, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Transliteration corrected to transcription  

message: Anyone have reference for the Wade system before Giles? I am trying to merge Cyrillization of Chinese from Wade-Giles with Cyrillization of Chinese from pinyin, but about half of the notations on Wade-Giles page appears to be garbage, so I speculate its the Wade system before Giles. --Voidvector (talk) 22:51, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pre-Giles Wade system 

message: As of now, there's no way to determine from the charts on this page how "fu" should be pronounced (as in "Kung-fu" or "K'ung-fu-tzu").  I assume that "u" is pronounced like "oo" in the English word "zoo."  But, I'd rather not assume. zadignose (talk) 02:29, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  "fu" 

message: "Nanjing" links to an article on that city, and nothing on the "nanjing" disambiguation page seems relevant to the romanization of Chinese words. Unfree (talk) 22:48, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Nanjing

message: The article refers in several places to 'old' and 'new' versions of Wade-Giles. This needs to be specific. What reform is being referred to, when was it? Tibetologist (talk) 08:34, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Old and New

message: The u-breve "ŭ" appears in the Wade–Giles system, and appears in the table (tzŭ, tz'ŭ, szŭ), but isn't mentioned/explained/illustrated in the article.  For a moment I thought, oh, these are part of the older WG system, and that use of û is just typographical stand-ins for the harder-to-get ŭ,... But the earlier text explains that "The older version writes tsû, ts'û, and ssû", and those aren't the things in the table.
It looks like ŭ is part of the newer system, but... is left off in almost every case, since it is both redundant and rare to find in a typecase?  I mean, looking across the symbols in the Comparison Chart, ŭ is the only letter not found in a typecase that you could use for all of English and French (and the only one not in Latin-1, or Code page 437, or MacRoman).  And: dropping it doesn't clash with some other syllable's spelling.
BUT! Goggling seems to show that when people put any accent on the u in "Lao Tzu", the typographically baroque "Lao Tzŭ" is common, and the "Lao Tzû" is uncommon!  ("Lao Tsŭ" and "Lao Tsû" are vanishingly rare.)
So: ŭ still appears only in the table, and its role in Old WG vs New WG vs who-knows-what isn't explained. -- Sean M. Burke (talk) 14:17, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "ŭ" 

message: It is infuriating how 2 British diplomats who clearly had no idea about any Chinese spoken languages appointed themselves to romanize Chinese words. So Wade created his unique one-of-a-kind system and began to teach it at "Cambridge University"? Then Giles was supposed to have "refined" this nothing-like-it system? He clearly failed to correct any of Wade's mistakes. And they were deemed the Chinese experts to train Chinese specialists? Talking about blind leading the blind! No wonder the gap of East and West remained wide and few words westerns said are understood by the Chinese. This ridiculous system should be assigned to the trash heap where it belongs so we can put the British imperialistic arrogance behind us and move on with the correct pin-ying system which transcribes the official Chinese unified language.
Why didn't Wade or Giles use normal English/International alphabets? Why should B and D not be included in their system? What happened to G? What's with all their use of CH that replaced multiple Chinese sounds which do not resemble anything close to the actual sound of ch? Were Wade and Giles illiterate in the English language also? What in the world is "tofu" and "tao" and "tai-chi"? There is no Taoism in China and no book named Tao Te Ching anymore than there is Klustenanity and Puple in the West. According to their system, London should be known as Lon'ton and England be known as Inkland? Americans, unfortunately, looked to Mother England for everything, right or wrong. No wonder the Dolittle Raiders in WWII were not able to find Chuchou after they bombed Tokyo in 1942. There is no such place as Chuchou in China.
Wade and Giles should go down history as two of the Stupidest People and two of the most Irresponsibly Arrogant People ever lived.
And who the hell translated the great Long River of China to Yangtze River? Yangtze River is a very small tributory river that flow into the Long River near the town of Yangzhou. Should the great Mississippi be now known as the Yatzu river because there is a small stream near the delta by that name?
Stupid is as stupid does. The old imperialists didn't know any better because they thought God was English. But they were clearly wrong. There is no reason why people now should remain ignorant and refuse to acknowledge their mistakes.    
VimalaNowlis (talk) 06:03, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Beer. —Sburke (talk) 10:17, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Quite funny to see this coming from someone who cannot spell "Pinyin". The sounds spelt by Pinyin "b, d, g" are not voiced! Mandarin Chinese contrasts aspiration vs. lack thereof (like English pin vs spin), not voicing vs. lack thereof (like English pin vs bin), making the Wade-Giles apostrophe perfectly sensible. Double sharp (talk) 09:32, 20 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  British Imperialist Arrogance 

message: The lede reads: "It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert Giles's Chinese–English Dictionary of 1892."
Under 'History' a couple of paragraphs later, we learn: "Wade published the first Chinese textbook in English in 1867. The system was refined in 1912 by Herbert Allen Giles, a British diplomat in China and his son, Lionel Giles, a curator at the British Museum."
Which is it? 84.92.8.221 (talk) 13:11, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contradiction 

message: I'll confess up front that I am neither a speaker nor a student of Chinese in any of its dialects.  This makes me a non-expert, yet probably representative of the audience this article should be written for.
Obviously Wade-Giles transliteration has largely been replaced by Pinyin, yet W-G lingers on in historical and even contemporary writing, especially for primarily English-speaking audiences.  Presumably Wade-Giles originally replaced some previous transliteration system(s).  Even if W-G has been deprecated, it was in vogue for a century more or less.  Whatever deficiencies may be evident in hindsight, W-G was historically important.
The History section needs to more clearly explain transitions into and out of W-G.  It is glaringly weak on the transition to Pinyin.  Apparently there has been some kind of religious war/paradigm shift.  Zeal of proselytizers or traditionalists notwithstanding, it should be possible to describe these transitions in clear, neutral, encyclopedic language.  I would like to know approximately when the PRC really started pushing Pinyin and the time period in which the West (e.g. New York Times, National Geographic magazine, Times of London etc.) switched over.  The existing section does a better job conveying that the ROC dragged its feet but eventually switched to Pinyin too. LADave (talk) 17:13, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe the History section would be a good place to address three widespread confusions.  Right on this talk page several comments assume the once familiar spelling "Peking" is correct Wade Giles, and that Wade Giles would have us say "pea-king."  They also assume every Chinese phoneme exists in English -- notably the pinyin x must have some conventional English spelling.  (One phrasebook suggests the middle sound in "fresh cheese." I am not kidding.)  These errors are corrected on the page now if you read carefully but the confusions remain common.  Maybe they should be addressed. Colin McLarty (talk) 00:22, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  History section seems weak 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Wade–Giles. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20100714072949/http://www.cybertranslator.idv.tw:80/pinyin/bopomofo.htm to http://www.cybertranslator.idv.tw/pinyin/bopomofo.htm
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 15:40, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: When you look up Wade-Giles on ctext.org, they use the grave accent instead of the left apostrophe, such that you get this:
t`ao2
http://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&reading=t%60ao2&method=wadegiles
I presume you all would say it should be written as tʻao2.
Who is right???  Geographyinitiative (talk) 23:21, 27 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Neither:  spiritus asper - sirlanz 00:33, 28 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Clarification:  Thomas Wade used the spiritus asper (vertically reflected apostrophe) ῾ (see e.g. (1867) Yü-yen tzu-erh chi) (as did Percy, Boym, Gouvea, Bridgman and Wells Williams) but Giles used the left apostrophe ‘ (opening quotation mark) (as did Premare, Chalmers, Lobscheid & Eitel), so if we're talking Wade-Giles, left/opening apostrophe, as in the article now, is correct.  Another group (Hager, Goncalves, Remusat, Medhurst, Kidd, Legge and Gutzlaff) used the plain old apostrophe (’).  sirlanz 04:26, 28 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm trying to make the punctuation consistent across articles that use Wade-Giles. This article is actually currently using , though I could change it to  which is what the above comments say the article is using or should use. However, MOS:STRAIGHT says that Wikipedia's house style uses straight quote marks where other publications might use curved. MOS:' says the same for curved apostrophes, but not for non-English letters that happen to resemble apostrophes. So should I actually be changing everything to ? -- Beland (talk) 21:26, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: (U+02BB is used to encode the ʻOkina and similar characters, which I assume this is not supposed to be?) -- Beland (talk) 21:30, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, given the variation I'm going to assume these are simply visual variants of the apostrophe, and go with ASCII  following MOS:STRAIGHT. Please ping me if you have an objection; if no one says anything I'll start making other articles consistent with this practice. -- Beland (talk) 04:55, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: They are not visual variants; from the point of view of someone knowing Ancient Greek point of view it makes sense to think of this as a spiritus asper, which is distinct from an apostrophe. Your proposed mass change would do some harm, and there is no reason to believe MOS:STRAIGHT should apply. —Kusma (t·c) 15:07, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Following discussion on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_China#Transliteration, I'm converting these characters to . I've converted this article; hope that looks good, and feel free to ping me if it doesn't.  Your note on the typographical history is extremely helpful. I added a vague summary of what you wrote to the article itself; if you happen to have particular publications in mind, full names of authors and citations would finish the job there.  Thanks all.  -- Beland (talk) 04:48, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for an extremely generous comment.  You're amazing.  I am adding this to my wikiwork and hope one day soon to get to it.  I really ought.  I have almost all the works in my library so no excuse to hide behind but time. sirlanz 09:18, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

text: Given this seems to be somewhat disputed and the involved editors haven't come here to reach a consensus, I'm going to untangle Wade-Giles from Greek and whatnot. I've created  and am changing articles over to use that for Wade-Giles transliteration. I've started it off with U+02BB and noted that as a possibility on rough breathing. If you think this is the wrong character, feel free to change the template or discuss with other editors on the template talk page. -- Beland (talk) 19:49, 28 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  ʻ or ` ??? 

message: Should tone marks be used in Wade-Giles transliterations? Is it Wei1 Chai2 Shih4 Pʻin1-yin1 or Wei Chai Shih Pʻin-yin?
TLDR: You’d be hard pressed to find anyone other than Wikipedia who transliterates Chinese with Wade-Giles tone marks. I searched for Mao² Tsê²-tung¹ on Gbooks and went away empty handed.
Until the early 1980s, Wade-Giles was that standard way to transliterate Chinese characters. It was popularized by A Chinese-English Dictionary  (1912) by Herbert Giles. The entry titles in Giles’ dictionary are all-caps and without tone marks: “HUANG.” The idea that the system includes tones marks does not come from the dictionary itself, but rather from usage by Giles in the preface and supplementary tables of his dictionary.
The name "Wade-Giles system" is intended to suggest "Wade's system as implemented in Giles dictionary." But in fact the system is usually understood to encompass implementations by Mathew's Dictionary (1943) and others. It is not the property of Herbert Giles. Encyclopedia Britannica`s article on the system includes an extensive list of examples, none of them with tone marks. The multivolume reference work Cambridge History of China is one of the few places where the contemporary reader might encounter Wade-Giles in the wild, so to speak. The CHC implementation does not include tone marks. FineStructure137 (talk) 14:01, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: In running text, tone marks are most often not used. For instance, people most often write ‘Nanjing’, not ‘Nánjīng’. Wikipedia follows this practice of leaving out tone marks in running text, writing ‘Beijing’ and ‘I Ching’, not ‘Běijīng’ and ‘I⁴ Ching¹’. So Wikipedia already follows the same practice as the Cambridge History of China. The only place Wikipedia does use tone marks is in infoboxes and parentheses, where the point is to communicate pronunciations, which is impossible without tone marks. Just like the spelling ‘Xiamen’ being more common than ‘Xiàmén’ doesn't mean we should refrain from writing ‘Xiàmén’ in a linguistics infobox, so the spelling ‘I Ching’ being more common than ‘I⁴ Ching¹’ doesn't mean we should refrain from writing ‘I⁴ Ching¹’ in a linguistics infobox. By your logic, we would have to remove all the tone marks from all the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn transcriptions in all the linguistics infoboxes. When the point is to communicate a pronunciation, people write Hànyǔ Pīnyīn and Wade-Giles with tone marks. When that's not the point, they most often don't, a practice which is followed by Wikipedia and the Cambridge History of China alike. You would have a case if A Chinese-English Dictionary, which is ‘the authoritative source for the Wade-Giles system of Romanization’, didn't contain Wade-Giles with tone marks, but it does, as pointed out in the discussion above. You're conflating the use of Wade-Giles in running text, where Wikipedia already follows your desired practice, with the use of Wade-Giles to convey pronunciations, which would not be possible without tone marks. Scriptions (talk) 21:42, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  RFC on Wade-Giles tone marks