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:
And it uses the following vowels and semivowels:
a â ă e ê i î o u û ü w y
The vowel letters also occur in various vowel digraphs, including the following:
âi âo âu eh ei ih ui
Features of the Legge system include:
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).