What is Wade–Giles?
'''Wade–Giles''' ({{zh|s=威妥玛拼音 or 韦氏拼音|t=威妥瑪拼音|p=wēituǒmǎ pīnyīn}}), sometimes abbreviated '''Wade''', is a [[romanization]] system for [[Chinese language|Chinese]] that is based on the form of [[Mandarin language|Mandarin]] used in [[Beijing]]. The system was produced by [[Thomas Francis Wade|Thomas Wade]] in the mid-[[19th century]] and was fully developed in [[Herbert Giles]]'s 1892 Chinese-English [[dictionary]]. Wade-Giles was the main [[transliteration]] system in the [[English-speaking world]] for much of the [[20th century]]. It is used in several standard reference books and in all books about [[China]] that were published before 1979. It replaced the [[Nanjing]]-based romanization systems that was common until the late 19th century. Wade-Giles has been replaced by [[pinyin]] but remains commonly used in [[Taiwan]], also known as the [[Republic of China]]. One well-known feature of Wade-Giles is that it uses the [[apostrophe]] to mark [[Aspiration|aspirated]] [[consonant]]s, or breathy consonants, as in [[Ancient Greek]]. For example, ''ping'' in pinyin would be written as ''p'ing'' in Wade-Giles, but ''bing'' in pinyin would be written as ''ping''. Sounds are written that way because Chinese, unlike English, has no [[Voiced consonant|voiced]] [[stop consonant]]s, [[Fricative consonant|fricatives]], or [[affricate]]s. Chinese distinguishes only aspirated and unaspirated sounds. Therefore, an apostrophe, instead of a different letter, is used. However, the apostrophe was not understood well by people who do not know the Wade-Giles spelling and so many people would ignore the apostrophe when reading or copying Chinese words, which led many non-[[Chinese people|Chinese]] people to say Chinese words incorrectly, including [[Tao]], [[Tai chi chuan|tai chi]], and [[Kung-fu|kung fu]]. Wade-Giles spellings that ignore the apostrophe completely are called bastardized Wade-Giles.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.pinyin.info/romanization/wadegiles/bastardized.html|title=problems with Wade-Giles|last=Swofford|first=