Why Does Qigong have different spellings?

Why is Qigong pronounced ‘Chee Gong’ and spelt Chi Kung, Chi Gong or Chi Gung?

The sound of a word creates a different resonance than on paper or typed into a computer. To speak is to share your resonance creating waves in the air, with an effect that is picked up by ears, thus creating communication. Language grew due to the need to convey information audibly.

The power of writing is a vital part of the transmission of ideas and knowledge. So which is the more important? Speaking or writing?

It’s not either/or, it’s both, which is where the confusion is with qigong.

The Mandarin sound for ‘q’ does not exist in English. The nearest we have is ‘ch’. If the English ‘q’ had an option on being pronounced softly, we’d be sorted.

Here is a brief history on how and why there are different spellings for the same practice.

All currently used spellings are correct from their sources. Originally they were more phonetic, enabling a truer pronunciation ‘chee gong: Qigong is a more precisely written translation of the alphabet characters from the Mandarin pictogram. A truly direct translation is unattainable due to many subtleties contained in said pictogram and the different way our Western alphabet creates words, resulting in closest corresponding letters being used and a transliteration occurring.

The most used systems for transliterating Mandarin into English are:

PINYIN (QIGONG) – Developed in the 1950s based on earlier romanisations of Chinese. It was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) adopted Pinyin as its standard in 1982, followed by the United Nations in 1986. Pinyin means ‘spelled sounds’ and is now the accepted system, having taken over from the following.

WADE-GILES (CHI KUNG) – This is a system devised in 1859 by the British diplomat Sir Thomas Francis Wade professor of Chinese at Cambridge, further improved by his successor Herbert Allen Giles in the Chinese-English dictionary of 1892. This was used widely in English language publications outside China until 1979.

YALE (CHI GUNG) – The Yale romanisation of Mandarin was developed in 1943 by the sinologist George Kennedy to help prepare American soldiers to communicate with Chinese allies in the field who did not have time to learn the Wade-Giles system.
This used English spelling conventions to represent Chinese sounds, assisting verbal conversation. The Yale system avoids the difficulties faced by the beginner trying to read pinyin using roman letters that don’t carry their expected phonetic values. The Yale method was widely used in Western textbooks until the late 1970s.

The ‘q’ in pinyin is pronounced like ‘ch’ and thus written as ‘ch’ in Yale and Wade-Giles. The older transliterations helped to convey pronunciation, whereas after the cultural revolution, the Chinese government’s new pinyin method did not as much.

During the height of the Cold War, preferring the Communist pinyin system over Yale was a political statement. The situation was reversed once the relations between the People’s Republic of China and the West improved. Communist China became a member of the United Nations in 1971 and by 1979 much of the world adopted pinyin as the standard for Chinese words. In 1982 pinyin became an ISO standard.

Interesting note.

If pinyin is the industry standard, why has the more well known Wade-Giles spelling of Tai Chi Chuan taken over pinyin’s Taijiquan?