The Yale romanization of Mandarin is a system for transcribing the sounds of

Standard Chinese Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standa ...

, based on

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...

varieties spoken in and around

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), Chinese postal romanization, alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the Capital city, capital of the China, People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's Li ...

. It was devised in 1943 by the

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

sinologist

George Kennedy George Harris Kennedy Jr. (February 18, 1925 – February 28, 2016) was an American actor who appeared in more than 100 film and television productions. He played "Dragline" opposite Paul Newman in ''Cool Hand Luke'' (1967), winning the Academ ...

for a course teaching Chinese to American soldiers, and popularized by continued development of that course at Yale. The system approximated Chinese sounds using English spelling conventions in order to accelerate acquisition of pronunciation by English speakers.Fenn and Tewksbury (1967), p. xii. The Yale romanization was widely used in Western textbooks until the late 1970s; in fact, during the height of the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...

, the use of the

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...

system over Yale romanization outside of China was regarded as a political statement or identification with the communist Chinese regime. The situation was reversed once the relations between the People's Republic of China and the West had improved. Communist China (PRC) became a member of the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoni ...

in 1971 by replacing Nationalist China (ROC). By 1979, much of the world adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for Chinese geographical names. In 1982, pinyin became an ISO standard; interest in Yale Mandarin declined rapidly thereafter.

Initials and finals

The tables below show the Yale Mandarin representation of each Chinese sound (in bold type), together with the corresponding

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners A ...

phonetic symbol (in square brackets), and equivalent representations in Zhùyīn Fúhào (bopomofo) and

Hanyu Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...

Initials

In Mandarin, stop and

affricate consonant An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...

s are all

voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies ...

, but show a contrast between an aspirated and unaspirated series. A much-criticized feature of the

Wade–Giles Wade–Giles () is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Francis Wade, during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert A. Giles's '' Chinese–English Dictionary'' o ...

system was its use of an apostrophe to indicate aspiration, as in the syllable ''t'a'' contrasting with the unaspirated ''ta''. The corresponding Yale spellings, ''ta'' and ''da'' respectively, suggest an approximation of the aspiration distinction to speakers of English, in which (unlike, say,

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...

) voiceless consonants like ''t'' are pronounced with distinct aspiration when they occur at the start of a word, but voiced ones like ''d'' are pronounced unaspirated and with weakened voicing in that position.Fenn and Tewksbury (1967), p. xii. Similar conventions were used in the earlier

Gwoyeu Romatzyh Gwoyeu Romatzyh (), abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Yuen Ren Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself la ...

system and the later

system. The Yale system, like Wade-Giles and Gwoyeu Romatzyh, represents

palatal consonants Palatals are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex. Characteris ...

using letters for similar sounds with which they are in

complementary distribution In linguistics, complementary distribution, as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation, is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other ele ...

. This is more intuitive for English speakers than the pinyin usage of the letters ''q'' and ''x'' wherein they no longer carry their expected values. For example, ''q'' in pinyin is pronounced something like the ''ch'' in ''chicken'' and is written as ''ch'' in Yale Romanization. ''Xi'' in pinyin is pronounced something like English ''she''; in Yale it is written as ''syi''.

Finals

Syllables with

syllabic fricative A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacri ...

s are spelled jr ( zhi), chr ( chi), shr ( shi), r ( ri), dz ( zi), tsz ( ci), sz ( si), suggesting approximate pronunciations to English speakers.Fenn and Tewksbury (1967), p. xiii. In pinyin, these are all spelled ''-i''. For example, "knowledge" () is spelled ''chih-shih'' in Wade–Giles and ''zhishi'' in pinyin, but in Yale romanization it is written ''jr-shr''—only the last will elicit a near-correct pronunciation from an unprepared English speaker.

Tones

Tone was marked using diacritics whose shape suggested the corresponding

pitch contour __NOTOC__ In linguistics, speech synthesis, and music, the pitch contour of a sound is a function or curve that tracks the perceived pitch of the sound over time. Pitch contour may include multiple sounds utilizing many pitches, and can relate t ...

: ''ā'' (high level), ''á'' (rising), ''ǎ'' (falling-rising) and ''à'' (falling).Fenn and Tewksbury (1967), p. xiv. The same method was adopted by

References

External links