Simplified Wade

Simplified Wade is a modification of the Wade-Giles romanization system for writing Mandarin Chinese. It was devised by the Swedish linguist Olov Bertil Anderson, who first published the system in 1970. Simplified Wade uses tonal spelling: in other words it modifies the letters in a syllable in order to indicate tone differences. It is one of only two Mandarin romanization systems that indicate tones in such a way (the other being Gwoyeu Romatzyh). All other systems use diacritics or numbers to indicate tone.

Spelling conventions

One of the important changes that Anderson made to Wade-Giles to was to replace the apostrophe following aspirated consonants with an <h>.^[1] This modification, previously used in the Legge romanization, was also adopted by Joseph Needham in his Science and Civilisation in China series.^[2] The table below illustrates the spelling difference.

Wade- Giles	Simplified Wade	Modern Pinyin	IPA form
t'	th	t	tʰ
p'	ph	p	pʰ
k'	kh	k	kʰ
ch'	chh	q/ch	tɕʰ/tʂʰ

The indication of tones in Simplified Wade is done by adding letters to the end of the syllable. The table below gives an example.

First tone	Second tone	Third tone	Fourth tone
ma	mav	max	maz

Notes

1. The IPA also indicates aspiration with a (superscript) ^h.
2. Neither of these systems, however, used the tonal letters discussed below.

References

Anderson, Olov Bertil [comp.] (1970). A Concordance to Five Systems of Transcription for Standard Chinese. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

External links

• A review of Anderson (1970), explaining Simplified Wade with an example