Word: wu
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Eugene Wu, librarian of the Harvard-Yenching Library, said yesterday that the library has been using the Wade-Giles system of transliteration since it opened 50 years ago, but the Chinese government's decision on January 1 to publish all its foreign-language publications by the Pinyin system may force East Asian libraries to convert to Pinyin...
...switch "would be tremendously difficult," Wu said, adding, "I don't even want to think about...
...Xurely you zhest," wrote Nancy May in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe. "Now 1 have trouble with dzylophone and dzerox, and I still can't pronounce Xiaoping." Eugene Wu, director of Harvard University's Yenching Library, sounded depressed. "I don't even want to think about it," he moaned...
...oddly spelled worry and Mr. Wu's woe were both responses to the virtually worldwide acceptance by news organizations and academic institutions of a different system of spelling Chinese names in English, called Pinyin. The changeover was started by Peking (um, er, Beijing) on Jan. 1, when the government of Zhongguo (otherwise known as China) decreed that in all its foreign-language publications Pinyin would replace the traditional Wade-Giles system of romanization. Agencies of U.S., British, French and other Western governments subsequently followed suit, as did news media around the world, including TIME. (One notable exception: London...
...they contemplated making millions of changes in card catalogues. The Harvard-Yenching Library, for example, has more than half a million cards in its catalogue, all recorded in Wade-Giles. "We cannot possibly cope with such a change now," says Librarian Wu. Similarly discouraged was the head archivist of the oriental manuscripts section of France's largest library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, who found Pinyin "unreliable" and, with true Gallic pride, "terrible for French...