Simplified Wade is a modification of 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...

 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...

 system for writing Mandarin Chinese. It was devised by the Swedish linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 Olov Bertil Anderson, who first published the system in 1970. Simplified Wade uses tonal spelling: in other words it modifies the letters in a syllable in order to indicate tone differences. It is one of only two Mandarin romanization systems that indicate tones in such a way (the other being Gwoyeu Romatzyh

Gwoyeu Romatzyh

Gwoyeu Romatzyh , abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Y.R. Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR...

). All other systems utilize diacritic

Diacritic

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

s or numbers to indicate tone.

Spelling conventions

One of the important changes that Anderson made to Wade-Giles to was to replace the apostrophe following aspirated consonants with an . This modification, previously used in the Legge romanization

Legge romanization

Legge romanization is a transcription system for Mandarin Chinese, used by the prolific 19th century sinologist James Legge. It was replaced by the Wade-Giles system, which itself has been mostly supplanted by Pinyin...

, was also adopted by Joseph Needham

Joseph Needham

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA , also known as Li Yuese , was a British scientist, historian and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, and as a fellow of the British...

 in his Science and Civilisation in China series. The table below illustrates the spelling difference.

Wade- Giles	Simplified Wade	Modern 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...	IPA form
t'	th	t	tʰ
p'	ph	p	pʰ
k'	kh	k	kʰ
ch'	chh	q/ch	tɕʰ/tʂʰ

The indication of tones in Simplified Wade is done by adding letters to the end of the syllable. The table below gives an example.

First tone	Second tone	Third tone	Fourth tone
ma	mav	max	maz

External links

• A review of Anderson (1970), explaining Simplified Wade with an example

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