EFEO Chinese transcription

The Chinese transcription of the ?cole fran?aise 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 It was superseded by .

Background

The transcription of the EFEO did not borrow its phonetics from the national official . Rather, it was synthesized independently to be a mean of Chinese dialects, and shows a state of sounds a little older in form . Hence, certain words which phoneme is , have been transcribed as either /ts/ or /k/.