T'ai Chi or
Taiji?
by Konrad Plendl
You may have seen Taiji spelled several ways such as T'ai Chi or Tai Chi.
This is because there are two main ways of writing Chinese using the Roman
alphabet that we are familiar with for writing English. Wade-Giles was developed
by Western scholars of Chinese in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century.
It is used in the spelling T'ai Chi. A more modern and exact way of spelling
Chinese using the Roman alphabet was developed in the Mid-Twentieth Century
and is know as Pinyin which means connected sounds. The Pinyin system is preferred
by Mainland Chinese and has become the standard way of spelling Chinese words.
It is now used by the Library of Congress and in official government documents.
As most of us know, the Chinese language is written using characters, not
letters. Each of the characters can have a different pronunciation in different
dialects of Chinese. Also a given character may have several different meanings.
For instance the character Wu can mean the Buddhist concept emptiness, but
it can also refer to martial as in Wushu, the practice of martial arts. Since
the letters of the Roman alphabet that we use in English (a, b,c, ...) are
for writing the sounds of English and other related languages, it is difficult
to write out the pronunciation of Chinese words. The Pinyin system was developed
to standardize the spelling and to make pronunciation as close as possible
using sounds in Western languages. Two common letter in Pinyin are pronounced
differently from they way they are in English. X is pronounced "sh" so
xin is pronounced "shin." Q is pronounced "ch" so qi is
pronounced "chi." Other letters are pronounced mostly as they are
in English. While your pronunciation of Chinese terms may not be absolutely
correct, you should be able to be understood by others in the same field, such
as martial arts.
Since the Pinyin system is used by many of the Chen style sites that we link
to, we will use it on this site to lessen confusion. It also indicates that
we are connected with the original form of Taiji from China and are not teaching
a Westernized form. Just remember that when you see the spellings Taiji, T'ai
Chi or Tai Chi that they all refer to the same general type of martial arts.
For more on Pinyin see the article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
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