NOTES AND QUERIES 
Trans** In I* 16 Journal for last year (1908) no less than three 
iiteration new s y s t ems for the transliteration of Chinese words are 
referred to, while, if we are not mistaken, four or five other, 
older, systems are used in the pages of the same volume. 
Transliteration is required for at least two distinct purposes. First, 
for the printing of Chinese hooks in roman letters for the use of the 
Chinese. And for this purpose it seems almost inevitable that a system 
representing approximately the sounds of the locality where a book is to be 
used will be employed ; that there must be, that is to say, a large number 
of systems of transliteration used in the printing of Chinese books. 
But the transliteration with which we are now concerned is that 
required for the representation of Chinese words in dictionaries, grammars, 
and other books written in European languages and destined for European 
and American readers in any part of China or of the world. For this 
purpose it seems needless to say that there ought to be and might be only 
one system — theoretically needless ; but in practice we find, as has been said, 
seven or eight systems used or incidentally referred to in a volume of 200 
pages, and the whole number of systems now or lately in use must be very 
much larger than seven or eight. 
No improvement seems to be likely until people will realize that no 
conceivable system can really describe the sounds accurately to one who has 
not heard them ; that no system will suggest quite the same sounds to 
different persons ; and that, granting a system which could describe sounds 
accurately to everyone, it would do so only for a few years, since the sounds 
themselves are changing : in a word, that the intrinsic scientific excellence 
of a system is of infinitesimal value compared with its simplicity and the 
fact of its actual use. What we want then is to make up our minds that the 
detection of a few flaws in an old system shall not tempt us to publish a new 
system which may appear to us to represent more accurately, in some cases, 
the particular sounds with which we happen to be familiar. For example, the 
scathing criticisms which are hurled, however justly, at Wade’s system do 
not affect the great claim to be universally adopted which it derives from its 
