The Chinese transcription of the

École française d'Extrême-Orient The French School of the Far East (french: École française d'Extrême-Orient, ), abbreviated EFEO, is an associated college of PSL University dedicated to the study of Asian societies. It was founded in 1900 with headquarters in Hanoi in w ...

(EFEO) was the most used phonetic transcription of Chinese in the

French-speaking world French became an international language in the Middle Ages, when the power of the Kingdom of France made it the second international language, alongside Latin. This status continued to grow into the 18th century, by which time French was the l ...

until the middle of the 20th century. While it is often deemed to have been devised by

Séraphin Couvreur Séraphin Couvreur (; EFEO Chinese transcription: kóu sái fēn; 14 January 1835 – 19 November 1919) was a French Jesuit missionary to China, sinologist, and creator of the EFEO Chinese transcription. The system devised by Couvreur of the � ...

(who was not an EFEO member), its actual creator was Arnold Vissière (1858–1930). It was superseded by

Hanyu Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...

. The transcription of the EFEO did not borrow its phonetics from the national official

Standard Mandarin Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standa ...

. 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 Sin Wenz and the older version of Wade-Giles). Hence, the phoneme (Pinyin: ), is transcribed as either or ; before the ''jian-tuan merger'' in contemporary Mandarin, i.e. the

merger Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspec ...

between the

alveolar consonants Alveolar (; UK also ) consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with ...

and the alveolo-palatal consonants, before the high front vowels and . Since EFEO makes use, to a large extent, of the phonetic values of Latin letters as used in French, the transcription of many Chinese syllables into the EFEO system is quite similar to how they were transcribed by French missionaries in the late 17th to 19th centuries (e.g., as seen in ''Description ... de la Chine'' compiled by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde); for example, " Yanzhou Fou" is "Yen-tcheou-fou" in both cases. However, a few features (notably, the wide use of "ts", and the use of apostrophes to show aspiration) distinguishes it from the early French missionary systems.See e.g. the transcription of place names, including "Yen tcheou fou", in du Halde,
pp. 10-11
/ref>

Table

Initials

Finals

Notes

Bibliography

* Drettas, Dimitri
“Fact-Checking Against Diluted Knowledge: Setting the Record Straight on Séraphin Couvreur and the EFEO Romanization System.”
''Sinology News'' 稷風 ewsletter of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology 2016, Issue 2, pp. 39-41.

External links

UNESCO transcription norms for Chinese
{{DEFAULTSORT:Efeo Chinese Transcription Standard Chinese Romanization of Chinese