The
Yale romanizations are four systems created at
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
for romanizing the four
East AsiaEast Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms. Geographically and geo-politically, it covers about , or about 28 percent of the Asian continent, about 15 percent bigger than the area of Europe, though some categorize Tibet, Xinjiang,...
n languages of Mandarin, Cantonese,
KoreanKorean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers. It was formerly written using Hanja, borrowed Chinese characters pronounced in the Korean...
, and
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none have gained general acceptance...
. The Yale romanization for Mandarin was created during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
for use by
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
military personnel, while the Yale romanization systems for the other three languages were created later, in the 1960s and 1970s.
Mandarin
Mandarin Yale was developed in 1943 by George Kennedy to help prepare American soldiers to communicate with their Chinese allies on the battlefield. Rather than try to teach recruits to interpret the standard romanization of the time, the
Wade-GilesWade–Giles , sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a Romanization system for the Mandarin language used in Beijing. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert Giles' Chinese–English dictionary of 1892.Wade–Giles' was the main...
system, a new system was invented that utilized the decoding skills that recruits would already know from having learned to read English, i.e. it used English spelling conventions to represent Chinese sounds. It avoided the main problems that the Wade-Giles system presented to the uninitiated student or news announcer trying to get somebody's name right in a public forum, because it did not use the "rough breathing (aspiration) mark" (which looks like an apostrophe) to distinguish between sounds like
jee and
chee. In Wade-Giles the first of those would be written
chi and the second would be written
ch'i. In the Yale romanization they were written
ji and
chi. The Yale system also avoids the difficulties faced by the beginner trying to read
pinyinPinyin , or more formally Hanyu Pinyin , is currently the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hanyu means the Chinese language, and pinyin means "phonetics", or more literally, "spelling sound" or "spelled sound"...
romanization because it uses certain Roman letters and combinations of letters in such a way that they no longer carry their expected values. For instance,
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 the
sh in
sheep, but in Yale it is written as
syi.
Zhi in pinyin sounds something like the
ger in
gerbil, and is written as
jr in Yale romanization. For example: in Wade-Giles, "knowledge" (知识) is
chih-shih; in pinyin,
zhishi; but in Yale romanization it is written
jr-shr—only the latter will elicit a near-correct pronunciation from an unprepared English speaker.
For example, if an American soldier, reading Wade-Giles, asked, "Where is the Japanese man's machine gun?" he might utter something like "Jippen jenty cheekwan chong tsai nay pien?" A Chinese soldier with a little English might strain something like this out of the question: "Jipping Jenny! Habitually chooses which cheat?!?" Reciting something from a sheet of emergency sentences written in Yale romanization he would say, "R ben ren de jigwan chyang dzai nei byan?" Even if it were not read perfectly, given the social context a speaker of Mandarin probably would get the idea pretty quickly. The pinyin version, "Ribenren de jiguanqiang zai nei bian?" could be intelligible if the soldier could pronounce qiang.
The tone markings from Yale romanization were adopted for pinyin.
Mandarin Yale was widely used in Western textbooks until the late 1970s; in fact, during the height of the
Cold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II , primarily between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States...
, preferring the "communist"
pinyinPinyin , or more formally Hanyu Pinyin , is currently the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hanyu means the Chinese language, and pinyin means "phonetics", or more literally, "spelling sound" or "spelled sound"...
system over Yale romanization was something of a political statement. The situation was reversed once the relations between the People's Republic of China and the West had improved. China became a member of the
United NationsThe United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and the achieving of world peace...
in 1971. By 1979, much of the world adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for Chinese geographical names. In 1982, pinyin became an
ISOThe International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO , is an international-standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on 23 February 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary industrial and commercial...
standard. Interest in Mandarin Yale declined rapidly thereafter.
Cantonese
Unlike the Mandarin Yale romanization,
Cantonese Yale is still widely used in books and dictionaries for
Standard CantoneseCantonese sensu stricto, also known as Canton dialect or Guangzhou dialect, is the prestige dialect of Yue Chinese , especially when pronounced with a Canton City accent...
, especially for foreign learners. Developed by Parker Po-fei Huang and Gerald P. Kok and published in 1970, it shares some similarities with Hanyu Pinyin in that unvoiced, unaspirated consonants are represented by letters traditionally used in English and most other European languages to represent voiced sounds. For example, is represented as
b in Yale, whereas its aspirated counterpart, is represented as
p. Because of this and other factors, Yale romanization is usually held to be easy for
American EnglishAmerican English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two thirds of native speakers of English live in the United States.English is the most common language in the United States...
speakers to pronounce without much training. In
Hong KongHong Kong , officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a highly autonomous territory of the People's Republic of China, facing Guangdong to the north and the South China Sea to the east, west and south...
, more people use
Standard Cantonese PinyinStandard Cantonese Pinyin is a romanization system for Standard Cantonese developed by Yu Bingzhao in 1971, and subsequently modified by the Education Department and Zhan Bohui...
and
JyutpingJyutping is a romanization system for Standard Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme...
, as these systems are believed to be more localized to Hong Kong people . Foreign students of Cantonese who attend Hong Kong University use Sidney Lau's spelling of Cantonese from his three-volume textbooks. Foreign students of Cantonese who attend Chinese University of Hong Kong's New-Asia Yale-in-China Chinese Language Centre are taught to use the Yale spelling of Cantonese and eventually learn to read those traditional English voiced consonants in a new unvoiced Cantonese way, subconsciously, without realizing they are doing so or without usually being aware of the linguistic difference.
Initials
Finals
- The finals m and ng can only be used as standalone nasal syllables.
Tones
There are nine tones in six distinct
tone contourA tone contour is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East and Southeast Asia, but occur elsewhere, such as the Kru languages of Liberia and the Ju languages of Namibia.-Themes:When the...
s in Cantonese.
Cantonese Yale represents tones using tone marks and the letter
h, as shown in the following table:
| No. |
Description |
Yale representation |
| 1 |
high-flat |
|
|
|
| 1 |
high-falling |
|
| |
| 2 |
mid-rising |
|
| |
| 3 |
mid-flat |
|
|
|
| 4 |
low-falling |
|
| |
| 5 |
low-rising |
|
| |
| 6 |
low-flat |
|
|
|
- Tones can also be written using the tone number instead of the tone mark and h.
- In modern Standard Cantonese
Cantonese sensu stricto, also known as Canton dialect or Guangzhou dialect, is the prestige dialect of Yue Chinese , especially when pronounced with a Canton City accent...
, the high-flat and high-falling tones are indistinguishable and, therefore, are represented with the same tone number.
- Three entering tone: entering high-flat, entering mid-flat, entering low-flat have the same tone contour
A tone contour is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East and Southeast Asia, but occur elsewhere, such as the Kru languages of Liberia and the Ju languages of Namibia.-Themes:When the...
s with high-flat, mid-flat, low-flat, but it have difference in codaIn phonology, a syllable coda comprises the consonant sounds of a syllable that follow the nucleus, which is usually a vowel. The combination of a nucleus and a coda is called a rime. A coda is not required in syllables...
which affect its short falling cadence only. So we use the same representation between three entering tones and flat tones.
Examples
| Traditional Traditional Chinese characters are the two standard sets of printed Chinese characters. The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, and have been more or less stable since the 5th century The retronym...
|
Simplified Simplified Chinese Characters are one of two standard sets of Chinese characters of the contemporary Chinese written language. They are based mostly on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms that were used in printed text for over a thousand...
|
Romanization using Tone Marks |
Romanization using Numbers |
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Korean
Korean Yale was developed by
Samuel Elmo MartinSamuel Elmo Martin is a former professor of Far Eastern Languages at Yale University and the author of many works on the Korean and Japanese languages....
and his colleagues at
Yale UniversityYale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale has produced many notable alumni, including five...
about half a decade after
McCune-ReischauerMcCune–Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language romanization systems, along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which replaced McCune–Reischauer as the official romanization system in South Korea in 2000...
, and is still used today, although mainly by
linguistsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
, among whom it has become the standard romanization for the language. The Yale system places primary emphasis on showing a word's morphophonemic structure. This distinguishes it from the other two widely used systems for romanizing Korean, the
Revised Romanization of KoreanThe Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea, used as a replacement for the 1984 McCune-Reischauer–based romanization system...
(RR) and
McCune-ReischauerMcCune–Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language romanization systems, along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which replaced McCune–Reischauer as the official romanization system in South Korea in 2000...
. These two usually provide the pronunciation for an entire word, but the morphophonemic elements accounting for that pronunciation often can not be recovered from the romanizations, which makes them ill-suited for linguistic use. In terms of morphophonemic content, the Yale system's approach can be compared to a North Korean orthography known as Chosŏnŏ sin ch'ŏlchapŏp (
HanjaHanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...
: ).
The Yale romanization represents each morphophonemic element (which in most cases corresponds to a
jamo, a letter of the Korean alphabet) by the same Roman letter, irrelevant of its context, with the notable exceptions of (RR
u) and (RR
eu) which the Yale system always romanizes as
u after
bilabial consonantIn phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...
s because there is no audible distinction between the two in many speakers' speech, and of the
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
wu that represents (RR
u) in all other contexts.
Vowel letters
| ㅏ |
ㅓ |
ㅗ |
ㅜ |
ㅡ |
ㅣ |
| a |
e |
o |
u/wu |
u |
i |
| ㅐ |
ㅔ |
ㅚ |
ㅟ |
| ay |
ey |
oy |
wi |
| ㅑ |
ㅕ |
ㅛ |
ㅠ |
| ya |
ye |
yo |
yu |
| ㅒ |
ㅖ |
| yay |
yey |
| ㅘ |
ㅙ |
ㅝ |
ㅞ |
ㅢ |
| wa |
way |
we |
wey |
uy |
Consonant letters
| ㄱ |
ㄲ |
ㅋ |
ㄷ |
ㄸ |
ㅌ |
ㅂ |
ㅃ |
ㅍ |
| k |
kk |
kh |
t |
tt |
th |
p |
pp |
ph |
| ㅈ |
ㅉ |
ㅊ |
ㅅ |
ㅆ |
ㅎ |
ㄴ |
ㅁ |
ㅇ |
ㄹ |
| c |
cc |
ch |
s |
ss |
h |
n |
m |
ng |
l |
The letter
q indicates
reinforcement which is not shown in hangul spelling:
halq il /
hallil/
halq kes /
halkket/
kulqca /
kulcca/
In cases of letter combinations that would otherwise be ambiguous, a period indicates the orthographic syllable boundary. It is also used for other purposes such as to indicate sound change:
nulk.un “old”
kath.i /
kachi/ “together”; “like”, “as” etc.
A macron over a vowel letter indicate that in old or dialectal language, this vowel is pronounced
longIn linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English...
:
māl “word(s)”
mal “horse(s)”
Note: Vowel length (or
pitchPitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
, depending on the dialect) as a distinctive feature seems to have disappeared at least among younger speakers of the
Seoul dialectThe Seoul dialect is the basis of the standard language of Korean in South Korea. It is spoken in the Seoul National Capital Area, which includes Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi. The dialect does not merely mean 'a standard accent'. The exact form of the South Korea's standard accent is that of...
sometime in the late 20th century.
A superscript letter indicates consonants that have disappeared from a word's South Korean orthography and standard pronunciation. For example, the South Korean orthographic syllable (RR
yeong) is romanized as follows:
- yeng where no initial consonant has been dropped.
Example: yenge
- lyeng where an initial l has been dropped or changed to n in the South Korean standard language.
Examples: lyengto; lNo Muhyen
- nyeng where an initial n has been dropped in the South Korean standard language.
Example: nYengpyen
The indication of vowel length or pitch and disappeared consonants often make it easier to predict how a word is pronounced in Korean dialects when given its Yale romanization compared to its South Korean hangul spelling.
There are separate rules for Middle Korean. For example,
o means (RR
o) in a romanization of the current language, but (
arae a) for Middle Korean, where is transcribed as
wo. Martin 1992 uses italics for romanizations of Middle Korean as well as other texts predating the 1933 abandonment of
arae a, whereas current language is shown in boldface.
External links