Yale Romanization

The Yale Romanizations are four systems created during World War II by the United States for its soldiers. They romanize the four East Asian languages of Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. The four romanizations, however, are unrelated in the sense that the same letter from one Romanization may not represent the same sound in another. They were once used in the US for teaching these Asian languages to civilian students, but are now mostly obscure and only sometimes used by academic linguists. Teaching Mandarin, for example, virtually always employs Hanyu Pinyin. And McCune-Reischauer has dominated the Korean romanization field for several decades.

Table of contents

1 Mandarin 2 Cantonese 3 References 4 External links

Mandarin

\nMandarin Yale Romanization was developed to prepare American soldiers to communicate with their Chinese allies on the battlefield. Rather than try to teach recruits to interpret the linguistically accurate but somewhat counter-intuitive 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. 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 mark" (which looks like an apostrophe) to distinguish between sounds like "gee" and "chee(se)". In Wade-Giles the first of those would be written "chi" and the second would be written "ch'i". In Yale romanization they would be written "ji" and "chi." The Yale system also avoids the difficulties faced by the beginner trying to read pinyin 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 it Yale it is written as "syi." "Zh" in pinyin sounds something like the "ger" in "gerbil," and is written as "jr" in Yale romanization. In Wade-Giles, knowledge is "chi-shih", in pinyin it is written "zhishi", but in Yale romanization it is written "jr-shr", and only the latter will get the unprepared reader anywhere near to pronouncing the Chinese word correctly. If an American soldier, speaking "Wade-Giles" asked, "Where is the Japanese guys' machine gun?" He would perhaps 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?" wouldn't be too bad if the soldier could pronounce "qiang."

Cantonese

\nUnlike the Mandarin Yale transliteration, Cantonese Yale is still widely used in books and dictionaries for Cantonese. Developed by Parker Po-fei Huang and Gerald P. Kok, it shares some similarities with Hanyu Pinyin in that unvoiced, unaspirated consonants are represented by letters traditionally used in English and other European languages to represent voiced sounds. For example, IPA /p/ is represented as b in Yale, whereas its aspirated counterpart, /p^h/ 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. Yale represents its tones using tone marks and the letter h, as shown below: Cantonese Yale Tones:\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n

Tone No.	Description	Yale representation
1	High-flat	sī	sīn	sīk
1	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

\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n \n \n \n\n\n \n \n \n\n

Initials

b

p

m

f

d

t

l

g

k

h

j

ch

s

y

w

gw

kw

aa finals

a

aai

aau

aam

aan

aang

aap

aat

aak

a finals

ai

au

am

an

ang

ap

at

ak

o finals

o

oi

ou

on

ong

ot

ok

e finals

e

ei

eng

ek

i finals

i

iu

im

in

ing

ip

it

ik

eu finals

eu

eui

eun

eung

eut

euk

u finals

u

ui

un

ung

ut

uk

ü finals

yu

yun

yut

nasal finals

m

ng

(N.B. Like Hanyu Pinyin, not every consonant is pronounced as it would be in English or other European languages. For instance, j is pronounced /ts/.)

References

\n* Cantonese. A Comprehensive Grammar, Stephen Matthews, Virginia Yip, Routledge 1994 ISBN 041508945X

External links

\n* English-Cantonese Dictionary with Yale Romanization\n* Comparison chart of Yale Romanization for Mandarin with Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao