Legge romanization is a transliteration 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 transliteration 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 зz
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.
External links
- Legge transliteration of Yijing hexagram names -- alongside their Wade-Giles and Pinyin forms