Legge romanization is a
transcription system for Mandarin Chinese, used by the prolific 19th-century sinologist
James Legge
James Legge (; 20 December 181529 November 1897) was a Scottish linguist, missionary, sinologist, and translator
who was best known as an early translator of Classical Chinese texts into English. Legge served as a representative of the Lond ...
. It was replaced by the
Wade–Giles
Wade–Giles ( ) is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from the system produced by Thomas Francis Wade during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert Giles's '' A Chinese–English Dictionary'' ...
system, which itself has been largely supplanted by
Hanyu Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means ' Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin'' literally ...
. The Legge system is still to be found in Legge's widely available translation of the ''
I Ching
The ''I Ching'' or ''Yijing'' ( ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. The ''I Ching'' was originally a divination manual in ...
'', and in some derivative works such as
Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley ( ; born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, novelist, mountaineer, and painter. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the pr ...
's version of the ''I Ching''. The transcription was initially devised by
Max Müller
Friedrich Max Müller (; 6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900) was a German-born British comparative philologist and oriental studies, Orientalist. He was one of the founders of the Western academic disciplines of Indology and religious s ...
for the publication of the multi-volume ''
Sacred Books of the East
The ''Sacred Books of the East'' is a monumental 50-volume set of English translations of Asian religious texts, edited by Max Müller and published by the Oxford University Press between 1879 and 1910. It incorporates the essential sacred texts ...
''.
Description
Although frequently called a "transliteration", Legge's system is a
transcription of Chinese, as there can be no
transliteration
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...
of Chinese script into any phonetic script, like the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...
.
Features of the Legge system include:
* the use of ⟨h⟩ to signal consonantal
aspiration: e.g. pinyin ⟨pi⟩ or Wade–Giles ⟨p'i⟩ corresponds to ⟨phî⟩,
* the use of a
Fraktur
Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. It is designed such that the beginnings and ends of the individual strokes that make up each letter will be clearly vis ...
letter ''z'' ⟨⟩
distinct from
Roman
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
*Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
*Roman people, the people of Roman civilization
*Epistle to the Romans, shortened to Romans, a letter w ...
⟨z⟩, and
* the use of italicized consonants distinct from their normal forms.
Comparing words in the Legge system with the same words in Wade–Giles shows that there are often minor but non-systematic differences, which makes direct correlation of the systems difficult.
Vowels
The system uses the following vowels and
semivowel
In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are ''y ...
s:
Vowel letters also occur in various
digraphs, which include:
Consonants
Legge transcription uses the following consonants:
References
{{reflist
External links
Legge transcription of Yijing hexagram names— alongside their Wade–Giles and Pinyin forms
Romanization of Chinese
I Ching