Legge romanization is a transcription system for Mandarin Chinese, used by the prolific 19th century sinologist James Legge

James Legge

James Legge was a noted Scottish sinologist, a Scottish Congregationalist, representative of the London Missionary Society in Malacca and Hong Kong , and first professor of Chinese at Oxford University...

. It was replaced by the Wade-Giles

Wade-Giles

Wade–Giles , sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a romanization system for the Mandarin Chinese language. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade during the mid-19th century , and was given completed form with Herbert Giles' Chinese–English dictionary of 1892.Wade–Giles was the most...

 system, which itself has been mostly supplanted by Pinyin

Pinyin

Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...

. The Legge system is still to be found in Legge's widely-available translation of the Yijing, and in some derivative works such as Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley , born Edward Alexander Crowley, and also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, was an influential English occultist, astrologer, mystic and ceremonial magician, responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema. He was also successful in various other...

's version of the Yijing.

Legge transcription uses the following consonants:

f h hs k kh k kh l m n ng p ph r s sh sz t th w y z z з зh з z

And it uses the following vowels:

a â ă e ê i î o u ui û ü

The vowel letters also occur in various vowel digraphs, including the following:

âi âo âu eh ei ih ui

Features of the Legge system include:

• the use of 'h's to signal consonantal aspiration
  Aspiration (phonetics)
  In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ...
  
   (so that what Pinyin spells "pi" and Wade-Giles spells "p'i", Legge spells as "phî"),
• the use of the Cyrillic/Fraktur
  Fraktur
  Fraktur is a calligraphic hand and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. The word derives from the past participle fractus of Latin frangere...
  
   letter "з" distinct from "z", and
• the use of italicized consonants distinct from their normal forms.

Comparing words in the Legge system with the same words in Wade-Giles shows that there are often minor but nonsystematic differences, which makes direct correlation of the systems difficult.

NB. Although frequently improperly called a "transliteration", Legge's system is a transcription

Transcription (linguistics)

Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...

 of Chinese, as there can be no transliteration

Transliteration

Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...

 of Chinese script into any phonetic script, like the Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 (or English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

) alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...

. Any system of romanization

Romanization

In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...

 of Chinese renders the sound

Sound

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...

s (pronunciation) and not the characters (written form).

External links

• Legge transcription of Yijing hexagram names -- alongside their Wade-Giles and Pinyin forms