Taijiquan, t'ai chi ch'uan
or Tai chi, what's the difference?
Only the spelling. There are two major systems for the Romanization
of Chinese characters. The older Wade-Giles system transliterates the three
Chinese Characters for this art as T'ai Chi Ch'uan.
This is often misspelled without the appostrophies, which are used to indicate
that the "T" is pronounced as a t and not a d, for example. The
more contemporary pinyin system transliterates these three characters as
taijiquan. This system has the advantage of not
confusing words such as qi (energy) with the ji in taiji, which are written
ch'i and chi in the Wade-Giles system.
The pinyin system has been the internationally accepted system for many decades and is the standard for international organizations, libraries, etc. the short hand, Tai chi, is a bit of a misnomer because it simply refers to the Chinese symbol we know as the yinyang symbol. The quan in taijiquan literally means fist of martial art. Taijiquan means the art based on the ideas of alternating yin and yang, yield releasing power etc. (Citation: http://www.grtc.org)
What about Kung Fu versus Gongfu?
Again,
only the spelling is different. Both mean skill acquired through effort. Kung
Fu is the wade-Giles transliteration while Gongfu is the pinyin transliteration.
To be consistant, we will use the pinyin version on the website as in Ziran Taiji Gongfu, the name of the taijiquan program at our school. (Ziran is pinyin for "natural/nature")
