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A Note on Romanization and Chinese Names
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Published:March 2013
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No standard romanization system for Chinese names was used a century ago in the original documents consulted in the preparation of this book. The venerable Wade-Giles system for rendering the Mandarin dialect of northern China, a variation of which was spoken by Wong Chin Foo, was just being developed when the action of this book begins, and had not yet come into popular use. But it would not have been particularly appropriate anyway, since most of the Chinese people mentioned in the book—indeed, most of the Chinese in America during this era—were Cantonese; more particularly, they were men from Xinning (now Taishan) County in Guangdong Province. They spoke an entirely different dialect, which to this day does not benefit from a standard, widely used romanization system, and they did not say, or attempt to spell, their names according to Mandarin pronunciation.
Spelling of Chinese names was not an issue in China, where written communication was accomplished entirely in characters. But when Chinese people came into contact with missionaries, or reached America’s shores, some form of romanized spelling of their names was required. If the immigrants themselves did not know how to render their names in letters, it was done for them by ship captains, immigration officers, court clerks, preachers, or journalists, few if any of whom spoke any Chinese at all.
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