Wade–Giles table

Updated on Dec 24, 2023

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This Wade–Giles table is a complete listing of all Wade–Giles syllables used in Standard Chinese. Each syllable in a cell is composed of an initial (columns) and a final (rows). An empty cell indicates that the corresponding syllable does not exist in Standard Chinese.

The below table indicates possible combinations of initials and finals in Standard Chinese, but does not indicate tones, which are equally important to the proper pronunciation of Chinese. Although some initial-final combinations occur with each of the five different tones, most do not. Some only occur with one tone.

Finals are grouped into subsets a, i, u and ü. i, u and ü groupings indicate a combination of those finals with finals from Group a. The following exceptions exist:

Most syllables are a combination of an initial and a final. However, some syllables have no initials. These are written in Wade–Giles according to the following rules:

if the final begins with a u, replace the u with a w

if the final begins with an ü, add y in the beginning

if the final begins with an i, replace the i with a y if there are other vowels; if there are no other vowels, add y in the beginning

if the final begins in any other way, keep the final as is

exceptions to the rules above are indicated by blue in the table's no initial column:

References

Wade–Giles table Wikipedia

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