'Legge romanization' is a
transcription system for Mandarin Chinese, used by the prolific
19th century sinologist
James Legge. It was replaced by the
Wade-Giles system, which itself has been mostly supplanted by
Pinyin. The Legge system is still to be found in Legge's widely-available translation of the
Yijing, and in some derivative works such as
Aleister Crowley's version of the Yijing.
Legge transcription uses the following consonants:
f h hs k kh k kh l m n ng p ph r s sh sz t th w y z z з зh з z
And it uses the following vowels:
a â ă e ê i î o u ui û ü
The vowel letters also occur in various vowel digraphs, including the following:
âi âo âu eh ei ih ui
Some of the more arcane features of the Legge system are: the use of h's to signal consonantal aspiration (so that what Pinyin spells "pi" and Wade-Giles spells "p'i", Legge spells as "phî"), the use of the
Cyrillic/
Fraktur letter "з" distinct from "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 nonsystematic differences, which makes direct correlation of the systems difficult.
'NB.' Although frequently improperly called a "transliteration", Legge's system is a
transcription of Chinese, as there can be no
transliteration of Chinese script into any phonetic script, like the
Latin (or
English)
alphabet. Any system of
romanization of Chinese renders the
sounds (pronunciation) and not the characters (written form).
External links
★
Legge transcription of Yijing hexagram names -- alongside their Wade-Giles and Pinyin forms