Wade-Giles

Wade-Giles, sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a Romanization (phonetic notation and transliteration) system for the Chinese language based on the form of Mandarin used in Beijing. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade in the mid-19th century, and reached settled form with Herbert Giles's Chinese-English dictionary of 1912. It was the main system of transliteration in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century, replacing the Nanjing-based romanization systems that had been common until late in the 19th century.

Other differences with Pinyin

• Wade-Giles chose the French-like j to represent a Northerner's pronunciation of what now is represented as r in Pinyin.
• Ü (as in 玉 "jade") always has umlaut above, while Pinyin only employs the umlaut in the four cases of lü, lüe, nü, and nüe.
• The Pinyin vowel cluster ong is ung in Wade-Giles. (See Confucius as an example.)
• After a consonant, the Wade-Giles vowel cluster uei is written ui in pinyin. However, both Romanizations, unlike some others, use iu and un instead of the complete syllables: iou and uen.
• I is never preceded by y, as in pinyin. The only exception is in placenames, which are hyphenless, so without a y, syllable ambiguity could arise.
• The isolated syllable eh! is written as ê, like in Pinyin. (Schwa is occasionally written as ê as well.) But unlike Pinyin, which uses -e if there's consonant preceding the sound, Wade-Giles uses -eh. (See circumflex)
• In addition to being the schwa, ê also represents the Pinyin er as êrh.