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( Wade-Giles)
Wade-Giles (pronounced /?we?d'?a?lz/; simplified Chinese ????? or ????; traditional Chinese ????? or ????; pinyin weituoma pinyin), sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a Romanization system (phonetic notation and transcription) for the Mandarin language used in Beijing. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade in the mid-19th century, and reached settled form with Herbert Giles' Chinese-English dictionary of 1892. Wade-Giles was the main system of transcription in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century, used in several standard reference books and in all books about China published before 1979.[1] It replaced the Nanjing-based romanization systems that had been common until late in the 19th century. It has mostly been replaced by the pinyin system today, but parts of it, especially the names of individuals and certain cities remain in use in the Republic of China (Taiwan). Although frequently improperly called "transliteration", Wade-Giles' system is a transcription of Chinese. There can be no transliteration of Chinese script into any phonetic script, like the Latin (or English) alphabet. Any system of romanization of Chinese renders the sounds (pronunciation) and not the logographic characters (written form). Wade-Giles was developed by Thomas Francis Wade, a British ambassador in China and Chinese scholar who was the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge University. Wade published the first Chinese textbook in English in 1867. The system was refined in 1912 by Herbert Allen Giles, a British diplomat in China.[2]
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