Yale Romanization Totally Explained

Everything about Yale Romanization totally explained

ť For other uses of Yale, see Yale (disambiguation).

The Yale romanizations are four systems created during World War II for use by United States military personnel. They romanized the four East Asian languages of Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese. 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. McCune-Reischauer, which predates Yale, has dominated the Korean romanization field for several decades and has recently lost ground to the Revised Romanization rather than to any Yale-based system.

Mandarin

Mandarin Yale was developed to prepare American soldiers to communicate with their Chinese allies on the battlefield. Rather than try to teach recruits to interpret the 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, for example it used English spelling conventions to represent Chinese sounds. 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 didn't use the "rough breathing (aspiration) mark" (which looks like an apostrophe) to distinguish between sounds like jee and chee. In Wade-Giles the first of those would be written chi and the second would be written ch'i. In the Yale romanization they were 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 in Yale it's written as syi. Zhi in pinyin sounds something like the ger in gerbil, and is written as jr in Yale romanization. For example: in Wade-Giles, "knowledge" (知识) is chih-shih; in pinyin, zhishi; but in Yale romanization it's written jr-shr - only the latter will elicit a near-correct pronunciation from an unprepared English speaker.
The tone markings from Yale romanization were adopted for pinyin.

Cantonese

Unlike the Mandarin Yale romanization, Cantonese Yale is still widely used in books and dictionaries for Standard Cantonese, especially for foreign learners. 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 most other European languages to represent voiced sounds. For example, [p] is represented as b in Yale, whereas its aspirated counterpart, [pʰ] 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. In Hong Kong, more people use Standard Cantonese Pinyin and Jyutping, as these systems are believed to be more localized to Hong Kong people .

Initials

b [p]	p [pʰ]	m [m]	f [f]
d [t]	t [tʰ]	n [n]	l [l]
g [k]	k [kʰ]	ng [ŋ]	h [h]
j [ts]	ch [tsʰ]	s [s]
gw [kw]	kw [kʰw]	y [j]	w [w]

Finals

a [a]	aai [ai]	aau [au]	aam [am]	aan [an]	aang [aŋ]	aap [ap]	aat [at]	aak [ak]
	ai [ɐi]	au [ɐu]	am [ɐm]	an [ɐn]	ang [ɐŋ]	ap [ɐp]	at [ɐt]	ak [ɐk]
e [ɛ]	ei [ei]				eng [ɛŋ]			ek [ɛk]
i [i]		iu [iu]	im [im]	in [in]	ing [ɪŋ]	ip [ip]	it [it]	ik [ɪk]
o [ɔ]	oi [ɔi]	ou [ou]		on [ɔn]	ong [ɔŋ]		ot [ɔt]	ok [ɔk]
u [u]	ui [ui]			un [un]	ung [ʊŋ]		ut [ut]	uk [ʊk]
eu [œ]		eui [ɵy]		eun [ɵn]	eung [œŋ]		eut [ɵt]	euk [œk]
yu [y]				yun [yn]			yut [yt]
			m [m̩]		ng [ŋ̩]

The finals m and ng can only be used as standalone nasal syllables.

Tones

There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese. Cantonese Yale represents tones using tone marks and the letter h, as shown in the following table:

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

Tones can also be written using the tone number instead of the tone mark and h.

In modern Standard Cantonese, the high-flat and high-falling tones are indistinguishable and, therefore, are represented with the same tone number.

Three entering tone: entering high-flat, entering mid-flat, entering low-flat have the same tone contours with high-flat, mid-flat, low-flat, but it have difference in coda which affect its short falling cadence only. So we use the same representation between three entering tones and flat tones.

Examples

Traditional	Simplified	Romanization using Tone Marks	Romanization using Numbers
		gwóng jàu wá	gwong2 jau1 wa2
		yuht yúh	yut6 yu5
		néih hóu	nei5 hou2

Korean

Korean Yale was developed by S. Martin and his colleagues at Yale University about half a decade after McCune-Reischauer, and is still used today, although mainly by linguists, among whom it has become the standard romanization for the language. The Yale system places primary emphasis on showing a word's morphophonemic structure. This distinguishes it from the other two widely used systems for romanizing Korean, the Revised Romanization of Korean (RR) and McCune-Reischauer. These two usually provide the pronunciation for an entire word, but the morphophonemic elements accounting for that pronunciation often can not be recovered from the romanizations, which makes them ill-suited for linguistic use. In terms of morphophonemic content, the Yale system's approach can be compared to a North Korean orthography known as Chosŏnŏ sin ch'ŏlchapŏp (Hanja: ).
The Yale romanization represents each morphophonemic element (which in most cases corresponds to a jamo, a letter of the Korean alphabet) by the same Roman letter, irrelevant of its context, with the notable exceptions of (RR u) and (RR eu) which the Yale system always romanizes as u after bilabial consonants because there's no audible distinction between the two in many speakers' speech, and of the digraph wu that represents (RR u) in all other contexts.
The letter q indicates reinforcement which isn't shown in hangul spelling:

halq il /hallil/

halq kes /halkket/

kulqca /kulcca/ In cases of letter combinations that would otherwise be ambiguous, a period indicates the orthographic syllable boundary. It is also used for other purposes such as to indicate sound change:

nulk.un “old”

kath.i /kachi/ “together”; “like”, “as” etc. A macron over a vowel letter indicate that in old or dialectal language, this vowel is pronounced long:

māl “word(s)”

mal “horse(s)” Note: Vowel length (or pitch, depending on the dialect) as a distinctive feature seems to have disappeared at least among younger speakers of the Seoul dialect sometime in the late 20th century. A superscript letter indicates consonants that have disappeared from a word's South Korean orthography and standard pronunciation. For example, the South Korean orthographic syllable (RR yeong) is romanized as follows:

yeng where no initial consonant has been dropped.
Example: yenge

^lyeng where an initial l has been dropped or changed to n in the South Korean standard language.
Examples: ^lyengto; ^lNo Muhyen

ⁿyeng where an initial n has been dropped in the South Korean standard language.
Example: ⁿYengpyen The indication of vowel length or pitch and disappeared consonants often make it easier to predict how a word is pronounced in Korean dialects when given its Yale romanization compared to its South Korean hangul spelling.
There are separate rules for Middle Korean. For example, o means (RR o) in a romanization of the current language, but (arae a) for Middle Korean, where is transcribed as wo. Martin 1992 uses italics for romanizations of Middle Korean as well as other texts predating the 1933 abandonment of arae a, whereas current language is shown in boldface.

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