Yale Romanization

The Yale romanizations are four systems created at Yale University for romanizing the four East Asian languages of Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese. The Yale romanization for Mandarin was created during World War II for use by United States military personnel, while the Yale romanization systems for the other three languages were created later, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Contents 1 Mandarin 2 Cantonese 2.1 Initials 2.2 Finals 2.3 Tones 2.4 Examples 3 Korean 3.1 Vowel letters 3.2 Consonant letters 4 See also 5 References 6 Bibliography 7 External links

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-Giles 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 pinyin romanization, which 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 last will elicit a near-correct pronunciation from an unprepared English speaker.

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 War, preferring the "communist" pinyin system over Yale romanization was something of a political statement.^[1] 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 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 Mandarin Yale declined rapidly thereafter.

Cantonese

This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Unlike the Mandarin Yale romanization, Cantonese Yale is still widely used in books and dictionaries for Cantonese, especially for foreign learners. Developed by Parker Po-fei Huang and Gerald P. Kok and published in 1970,^[2] 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, [p] is represented as b in Yale, whereas its aspirated counterpart, [pʰ] is represented as p. Because of this and other factors, Yale romanization is usually held to be easy for American English speakers to pronounce without much training. In Hong Kong, more people use Cantonese Pinyin and Jyutping, as these systems are more localised 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

b [p]	p [pʰ]	m [m]	f [f]
d [t]	t [tʰ]	n [n]		l [l]
g [k]	k [kʰ]	ng [ŋ]	h [h]
gw [kw]	kw [kʰw]			w [w]
j [ts]	ch [tsʰ]		s [s]	y [j]

Finals

a [a]	aai [ai]	aau [au]	aam [am]	aan [an]	aang [aŋ]	aap [ap]	aat [at]	aak [ak]
	ai [ɐi]	au [ɐu]	am [ɐm]	an [ɐn]	ang [ɐŋ]	ap [ɐp]	at [ɐt]	ak [ɐk]
e [ɛ]	ei [ei]				eng [ɛŋ]			ek [ɛk]
i [i]		iu [iu]	im [im]	in [in]	ing [ɪŋ]	ip [ip]	it [it]	ik [ɪk]
o [ɔ]	oi [ɔi]	ou [ou]		on [ɔn]	ong [ɔŋ]		ot [ɔt]	ok [ɔk]
u [u]	ui [ui]			un [un]	ung [ʊŋ]		ut [ut]	uk [ʊk]
eu [œ]		eui [ɵy]		eun [ɵn]	eung [œŋ]		eut [ɵt]	euk [œk]
yu [y]				yun [yn]			yut [yt]
			m [m̩]		ng [ŋ̩]

• The finals m and ng can only be used as standalone nasal syllables.

Tones

Historically, there were seven phonemically distinct tones in Guangzhou Cantonese. Cantonese Yale represents these tones using tone marks and the letter h, as shown in the following table:

No.	Description	Yale representation
1[3]	high-flat	sī	sīn	sīk
1[3]	high-falling	sì	sìn
2	mid-rising	sí	sín
3	mid-flat	si	sin	sik
4	low-falling	sìh	sìhn
5	low-rising	síh	síhn
6	low-flat	sih	sihn	sihk

• Tones can also be written using the tone number instead of the tone mark and h.
• Traditional Chinese linguistics treats the tones in syllables ending with a stop consonant as separate "entering tones". Cantonese Yale follows modern linguistic conventions in treating these the same as tones 1, 3 and 6, respectively.

Examples

Traditional	Simplified	Romanization using Tone Marks	Romanization using Numbers
廣州話	广州话	gwóng jàu wá	gwong2 jau1 wa2
粵語	粤语	yuht yúh	yut6 yu5
你好	你好	néih hóu	nei5 hou2

Korean

Korean writing systems
Hangul Hanja Hyangchal Gugyeol Idu Mixed script Korean transliteration Revised Romanization McCune–Reischauer Yale ISO/TR 11941 Kontsevich (Cyrillic)

Korean Yale was developed by Samuel Elmo Martin and his colleagues at Yale University about half a decade after McCune-Reischauer, and is still used today, although mainly by linguists, 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 Korean (RR) and McCune-Reischauer. 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 (Hanja: 朝鮮語新綴字法).

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 ㅜ (RR u) and ㅡ (RR eu) which the Yale system always romanizes as u after bilabial consonants because there is no audible distinction between the two in many speakers' speech, and of the digraph wu that represents ㅜ (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:

• 할 일 halq il /hallil/
• 할 것 halq kes /halkket/
• 글자 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:

• 늙은 nulk.un “old”
• 같이 kath.i /kachi/ “together”; “like”, “as” etc.

A macron over a vowel letter indicate that in old or dialectal language, this vowel is pronounced long:

• 말 māl “word(s)”
• 말 mal “horse(s)”

Note: Vowel length (or pitch, depending on the dialect) as a distinctive feature seems to have disappeared at least among younger speakers of the Seoul dialect 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 영 (RR yeong) is romanized as follows:

• yeng where no initial consonant has been dropped.
  Example: 영어 (英語) yenge
• ^lyeng where an initial l (ㄹ) has been dropped or changed to n (ㄴ) in the South Korean standard language.
  Examples: 영[=령]도 (領導) ^lyengto; 노[=로]무현 (盧武鉉) ^lNo Muhyen
• ⁿyeng where an initial n (ㄴ) has been dropped in the South Korean standard language.
  Example: 영[=녕]변 (寧邊) 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 ㅗ (RR o) in a romanization of the current language, but ㆍ (arae a) for Middle Korean, where ㅗ 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.

See also

• JSL romanization

References

Bibliography

• Guan, Caihua (2000). English-Cantonese Dictionary. Chinese University Press. ISBN 962-201-970-6. 
• Matthews, Stephen & Yip, Virginia (1994). Cantonese. A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-08945-X. 
• Martin, Samuel E. (1992). "Yale Romanization.". A Reference Grammar of Korean (1st edition ed.). Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Publishing. pp. 8 ff. ISBN 0-8048-1887-8. 

External links

• Comparison chart of Yale Romanization for Mandarin with Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao
• Comparison chart of Romanization for Cantonese with Yale, S. Lau, Guangdong, Toho and LSHK (uses Shift JIS encoding)
• MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary (supports Cantonese Yale romanization)
• Cukda Cantonese IME