Romanization Systems, Chinese | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Because the Chinese do not use the Roman (Latin) alphabet to record their language, if it is to be written in the Roman alphabet it must be transliterated, or romanized. This is true whenever one wants to represent in the Roman alphabet a language that uses another script, whether the other script uses an alphabet (as do Arabic and Russian), a syllabary (as does Japanese), or ideographic characters, such as Chinese.

The Chinese developed hanzi (Chinese characters) to represent words, concepts, or ideas. The earliest attested Chinese characters, found on bones used for divination that date to the second millennium BCE, imitated the objects they represented (that is, the character for "eye" would look something like an eye). More complicated characters were formed by joining two or more visual shapes, by using certain shapes to symbolize concepts, and by the development of standard elements that could indicate pronunciation or some aspect of meaning (for example, the element meaning "tree" will occur in the characters for any number of specific types of tree, such as pine or plum).

Chinese characters have allowed people speaking widely varying Chinese dialects (so different, in fact, as to be more like separate languages) to communicate with each other. Because Chinese is a language with many homophones (words with different meanings but the same pronunciation), it is useful to have a system of writing that distinguishes between homophones visually, as Chinese characters do. This is especially true when the way in which words are pronounced differs so markedly from region to region.

Therefore it is perhaps no surprise that it was the foreign missionaries, diplomats, and merchants who first attempted to use alphabets to represent Chinese sounds. Jesuit missionaries, active in China in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, introduced phonetic scripts based on the Roman alphabet. In 1867, British diplomat Thomas F. Wade (1818–1895) devised a phonetic script system based on Mandarin, one of the major Chinese dialects. Forty-five years later, in 1912, the Wade system was modified by H. A. Giles (1845–1935), an English scholar of Chinese. This modification was called the Wade-Giles system, and it has been in use for almost a century.

In 1918, the Chinese themselves developed a phonetic alphabet, called zhuyin zimu ("national phonetic alphabet"), using portions of characters to represent sounds. Realizing the importance of using the Roman alphabet, in 1828 the Chinese government promulgated a second form of phonetic script, guoyu lomazi ("national romanized writing"), which used the Roman alphabet along with special markers to indicate tones. However, neither the zhuyin zimu nor the guoyu lomazi succeeded in replacing Chinese characters. The Zhuyin zimu failed to become popular among foreigners, and the latter failed partially due to its clumsy tone symbols.

In the meantime, influenced by the Soviet approach to the problem of illiteracy, a group of Chinese residing in the Soviet Union (with help from Moscow), started the "Latinization of Chinese" movement. The features of pinyin romanization that make it most mysterious to English speakers (its use of q for the ch sound in the English word church, or its use of x for the palatal spirant represented in Wade-Giles by hs) came about because the system was based on Russian methods of romanizing Cyrillic—and those were the letters the Russians used for the equivalent sounds in Russian.

One of the most prominent early leaders of the movement was Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), who published a pamphlet entitled "Chinese Latinized Alphabet" in 1930. The final version of Qu's system used only those letters appearing on regular typewriters. It grouped syllables together as words and omitted symbols representing tones. This system covered Mandarin only; Qu suggested that different systems for other dialects or minority languages be developed.

Qu's system was introduced to China in 1931, with a notion that eventually the Chinese characters would be replaced by this romanization system. But advocates of guoyu lomazi criticized the new system, especially for its lack of tone marks. Many left-wing writers, including Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, and Ba Jin, favored the new system, although Soviet support for this movement disappeared from 1939, when the Soviet Union abandoned the Roman alphabet in favor of Cyrillic script.

The new system was called xin wenzi (new script) or ladinghua xin wenzi (latinized new script). During the period of the Second World War (1939–1945), petitions were made by advocates of xin wenzi, but these were not given much attention either by the Nationalists or by the Chinese Communists. In 1958 the xin wenzi was replaced by pinyin (pinyin in Chinese means "to spell phonetically"), a modification of Qu's system. Pinyin was adopted by the United Nations in 1977. It has gradually increased in popularity outside China, where it allows a standardization in romanizing Chinese (previously German, French, and English transliteration systems all romanized Chinese in accordance with how the Roman alphabet is pronounced in those languages—which made them differ from one another).

Pinyin, like Wade-Giles, is based on Mandarin. Characteristic of Mandarin is that the distinction between b and p, d and t, and g and k is one of aspiration versus non-aspiration, not voiced versus voiceless pronunciation. Wade-Giles represents the distinction with a mark indicating aspiration: the b sound is represented with a p, while the p sound is represented with a p'. In pinyin, by contrast, the b sound is represented with a b and the p with a p. Similarly, in Wade-Giles the d sound is represented with a t, while the t sound is represented with a t'. In pinyin, the d sound is represented with a d and the t with a t.

Both pinyin and Wade-Giles are limited in that they were not designed to represent the speech of some of the other Chinese languages and dialects. Also, neither system represents tones. There are only four tones in Mandarin, but there are nine in Yue, another dialect. In the future, it is possible that different spelling systems for other Chinese languages and dialects will be developed and that symbols for tones and other linguistic features may also be developed.

Other methods of romanizing Chinese include the early-twentieth-century Chinese Post Office System, which gave the world the romanizations Peking and Nanking for the cities known in pinyin as Beijing and Nanjing (in Wade-Giles they would be Pei-ching and Nan-ching, respectively). Tongyong pinyin is a romanization system based on Wade-Giles that used in Taiwan, where, nevertheless, there is growing use of Hanyu pinyin, the pinyin used in the rest of China. (In 1999, the government of Taiwan announced that street signs would be romanized in Hanyu pinyin). The Yale system, created in 1948, was used in the United States as a teaching tool. Gwoyeu romatzyh (National Romanization) was created in 1928. It indicates differences in tone with different spellings and has also been popular as a teaching tool in the United States. It also enjoys some use on Taiwan, where a simplified version was promulgated in the 1980s.

John Young and the editorial staff of Berkshire Publishing Group

DeFrancis, John. (1950) Nationalism and Language Reform in China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Karlgren, Bernhard. (1928) The Romanization of Chinese. London: China Society.

Ramsey, S. Robert. (1987) The Languages of China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Seybolt, Peter J., and Gregory Kuei-ke Chiang, eds. (1979). Language Reform in China. White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Zhao Yuanren. (1922) "A System in Romanization of the National Language." The Chinese Students' Monthly 17, 3.

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