The Chinese transcription of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) was the most used phonetic transcription of Chinese in the French speaking world until the middle of the 20th century. It was created by Séraphin Couvreur of the aforesaid institute in 1902. It was superseded by Hanyu Pinyin.

[edit] Background

The transcription of the EFEO did not borrow its phonetics from the national official Mandarin (simplified Chinese: 普通话; traditional Chinese: 普通話; pinyin: pǔtōnghuà). Rather, it was synthesized independently to be a mean of Chinese dialects, and shows a state of sounds a little older in form (as in Latinxua Sinwenz and the older version of Wade-Giles). Hence, certain words which phoneme is [tɕ] (Pinyin: /j/), have been transcribed as either /ts/ or /k/.

[edit] Table

IPA	EFEO	WG	Pinyin
p	p	p	b
pʰ	p'	p'	p
t	t	t	d
tʰ	t'	t'	t
k	k	k	g
kʰ	k'	k'	k
ts	ts	ts	z
tsʰ	ts'	ts'	c
tʂ	tch	ch	zh
tʂʰ	tch'	ch'	ch
tɕ	k/ts	ch	j
tɕʰ	k'/ts'	ch'	q
ɕ	s/h	hs	x
w	ou/w	w	w
j	i/y	y	y
ɤ	ö/é	o/ê	e
ɚ	eul	êrh	er
ɯ	eu	û	i
i	i	ih	i
y	u	ü	ü/u
u	ou	u	u
ən	en	ên	en
ɤŋ	eng	êng	eng
iɛ	ie	ieh	ie
iɤʊ	ieou/iou	iu	iu
iɛn	ien	ien	ian
uo	ouo	o/uo	o/uo
uaɪ	ouai	uai	uai
ueɪ	ouei	ui	ui
uan	ouan	uan	uan
uən	ouen	un	un
yɛ	iue	üeh	üe/ue
yɛn	iuen	üan	üan/uan
yn	iun	ün	ün/un
yʊŋ	ioung	iung	iong

This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

[edit] Hyperlinks

• Romanizations for chinese
• UNESCO transcription norms for Chinese