EFEO Chinese transcription


The Chinese transcription of the École française d'Extrême-Orient 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 It was superseded by Hanyu Pinyin.
The transcription of the EFEO did not borrow its phonetics from the national official Standard Mandarin. Rather, it was synthesized independently to be a mean of Chinese dialects, and shows a state of sounds a little older in form. Hence, the phoneme , is transcribed as either or ; before their merger in contemporary Mandarin 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 ; for example, "Yanzhou Fou" is "Yen-tcheou-fou" in both cases. However, a few features distinguishes it from the early French missionary systems.

Table

Initials

Finals