Why Did Yale University Make a Romanization System for East Asian Languages | Yale Romanization

Video Link:

【Comparison of Standard Chinese transcription systems】https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Standard_Chinese_transcription_systems 

【Yale romanization of Cantonese converter】

https://hongkongvision.com/tool/cc_py_conv_en 

Intro

After learning Cantonese, I started to focus on the corresponding things about Cantonese. So until one day, I suddenly realised there’s actually another practical Cantonese Pinyin system, besides the Jyutping system. So today’s video/article, let’s talk about what this system is. 

What Is the Yale Romanization

First of all, let’s learn about its name and this is the Yale romanization. This system was called romanization, so its function should be more powerful. Because of the pinyin system or bopomofo or other similar systems, they are always an assistance tool in order to help people to mark the sound of every character. But the romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman or called Latin script. So here is a little bit different between Pinyin and romanization. 

Then, although I saw Yale romanization to mark the sound of Cantonese at first, in fact this system includes 4 romanization systems created at Yale University for the four East Asian languages, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Japanese. 

History

In the Pacific War, in 1943 Yale University had a center for short-term foreign language education for military purposes. So now we must mention a man, who was George Alexander Kennedy. In 1936 he began teaching Chinese at Yale University. He was made an assistant professor in 1937, an associate professor in 1943. Maybe in the same year he entered the center and he was responsible for intensive education in Chinese and Japanese. In order to teach the language, he created a Romanization system as his textbooks. So this should be the origin of the Mandarin Chinese version’s Yale Romanization. 

Additionally, I think Dr. Kennedy was a very legendary scholar in linguistics. Especially his early life. Although he was from an American missionary family, he was born in Zhejiang Province, China so he also was a native speaker of Wu Chinese. Because he was born in 1901, he experienced most of the big historical events, like the collapse of the Qing dynasty, Chinese Civil War, WW2, etc. Maybe one day we can have a video/article to talk about him. 

Then the Cantonese Yale Romanization was created by Parker Po-fei Huang (黄伯飞) and Gerald P. Kok. Also Huang used this romanization to teach Cantonese to non-native speakers at Yale University. The Korean Yale Romanization was a Korean romanization created by some professors of Yale University after McCune–Reischauer romanization was published. But the Korean Yale Romanization might not be perfect because it could not reflect the pronunciation changes of Korean. And the Japanese Yale Romanization also was created by the professors of Yale University and was aimed at teaching and helping the non-native speakers learn the language. Honestly until I made the video/article, I finally realised it’s likely I ignored many stories of these great scholars in history. Like the creators of Yale Romanizations, everyone of them was a very great scholar and we should remember them. 

Now the following parts, I will take the Mandarin’s Yale romanization system and the Cantonese’s Yale romanization system as the examples. The reason why I’m going to choose both languages? Honestly it’s because both languages are better known to me than Korean and Japanese. So finally I choose both languages. I think maybe if in the future I can learn Korean and Japanese more deeply, I will also add the rest in the future video/article.  

Yale Romanization ≠ Wade-Giles Conversion

If we talk about the Mandarin romanization that was created by the western world, the Wade-Giles Conversion was also a very typical romanization of Chinese characters. So whether both systems are the same or very similar? If we focus on the details, we will find that both actually have some obvious points. To be honest, the Mandarin Yale Romanization is like it combined the Hanyu pinyin of today and the Wade-Giles Conversion. But if you can read Pinyin, reading the Mandarin Yale Romanization will not be a hard thing. 

The only different points are that, for example, “bian” is the pinyin writing method and “byan” is the Yale method. “duan” is pinyin and “dwan” is the Yale version. “hao” is pinyin and “hau” is the Yale method. “Chi” in Pinyin and “Chr” in Yale romanization. So if you want to learn more details, you can check this list and I will put it in the description of this video/article. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Standard_Chinese_transcription_systems 

Yale Romanization ≠ Jyutping system

Speaking of the Cantonese Yale Romanization, the most obvious difference should be the marking method of tones.  Cantonese tones are more than the Standard Mandarin Chinese tones. In all, Cantonese has 9 tones, which includes 2 categories, 6 tones in Non-stop coda and 3 tones in Stop coda. The Jyutping system uses the number 1 to 9 to mark and distinguish the 9 different tones. But in Cantonese Yale romanization system, it didn’t choose the number as the tone’s mark but its way is more like the way of Standard Mandarin’s Hanyu Pinyin. 

So here we can find that the Cantonese Yale Romanization has more one tone mark than the Jyutping system in order to distinguish the high level and high falling in the dark flat tone, also known as the number 1 tone. 

(*But the Cantonese Yale Romanization sometimes uses the numbers as the tone marks as well if it’s hard to type the special diacritic.)

Then, the Cantonese Yale Romanization will add one more letter to distinguish the details. In the no tone mark part, it uses “h” to distinguish the number 3 and the number 6 tones of the Jyutping system. In the rising mark part, it also uses “h” to distinguish the number 2 and number 4 tones of the Jyutping system. As the same, in the departing mark part it still uses “h” to distinguish the high falling number 1 tone and the number 4 tone of the Jyutping system. As for the Stop coda tones, the Cantonese Yale Romanization will add the letter “k” and combine the corresponding tones to distinguish the different tones in Stop coda category and the number 7 to number 9 tone marks in the Jyutping system. 

To be honest, although the Jyutping system has more generally and widely used scenes, for example, teaching non-native people to learn Cantonese, the Cantonese romanization in Google translate and most of the Cantonese input method, etc, I think the Cantonese Yale Romanization is more intuitive. The reasons are very simple. When I learnt Cantonese at first, I still spent time in order to learn the Jyutping system and I had to remember what the numbers mean the corresponding tones. However, the reading logic of Cantonese Yale Romanization is more like the Hanyu Pinyin, we can see the tone marks on the head of letters to read it very easily, if the mark looks like an up mark and the tone is a raising mark as well. 

So this is a brief story of Yale Romanization and thank you for watching. Hope you can like this video/article. Have a good day. See you next time. Bye!