Chinese speakers: Why is Wade-Giles so weird?

Question

Why is it that the creators of the Wade-Giles romanization system chose so many unintuitive transliterations of Chinese sounds? Why is "p" pronounced as "b" in English, and "k" pronounced as "g," for instance? I know Wade-Giles was intended for academics, but that doesn't seem to explain why they would do things that make no sense. How does it help the academic to have to mentally substitute all Ps for Bs, unless they have an apostrophe after them? I don't get it..

Answer 1

I agree with you 100%. Instead of just using Roman characters that would approximate to the sounds of the Chinese language as closely as possible, Wade and Giles came up with a system that only a linguist could appreciate. The majority of the confusion lies in the way they rendered the unvoiced consonants (those consonants on which you can't sing a continuous tone). They differentiated the aspirated and unaspirated consonants by using the same characters, distinguishing them only with an apostrophy.

This doesn't mean much to the average English speaker, since an aspirated /p/ and an unaspirated /p/ are the same phoneme to him - 'pit' and 'spit' have exactly the same /p/ sound. But they don't to the phonetician!!

Being a bit of an (amateur obsessive) linguist, I can just about appreciate what they were trying to do; but you're absolutely right, the system is not intuitive. If you've studied Spanish, Italian or any other 'closer' languages, you may have noticed that the sound for [t] for example is quite different from the English [t] in initial position. Not a few English-speaking learners of Spanish, when first hearing a word like 'tengo', wonder why the native speaker pronounces it more like [dengo] to their ears: it's because English initial /t/ is pronounced rather like [ts] and when they hear a 'pure' Spanish /t/, they interpret it as a [d]. Probably a bit heavy at this time of the evening; but it may help give you an insight into the W-G romanisation of Chinese.

Answer 2

System made by 2 British men by the names of Sir Thomas Francis Wade and Herbert Allen Giles. They are only called doctors because they are considered "linguists". Since most Europeans can't pronounce Chinese words, they have to devise a system that's similar to European languages. An apostrophe = aspiration or a puff of air after the sound of letter, letters are produced.

Answer 3

Not to be unkind, but the previous answerer is probably right. However, to give you just a quick idea of the "why" of Wade-Giles:
The Chinese "b" sound is not actually the same as an English b. It is an unaspirated "p". In other words, it's like the p in "spate" rather than the p in "pate". Same with T and D, K and G, etc. There is method to their madness. However, pinyin is absolutely far simpler for the average person.

Answer 4

your not intellectual enough to understand....find a simpler topic