I started out from the principle of substituting a single symbol for each Manchu letter, while avoiding the addition of diacritical marks as much as possible.
In English-language publications, the latter is often incorrectly[citation needed] credited with being the inventor of the system, probably because his Manchu Grammar (1892) was the first book in English to use it.
In the standard transliteration, the spellings sh and th each represent two separate consonants, as in eshen /əsxən/ "uncle", butha /butχa/ "hunting, fishing".
In Hu’s transliteration, separate s and h are written as s’h (es’hen) to avoid confusion with sh (Norman š).
The following transliteration (paired in the table below with the Norman system) was designed by the Russian diplomat and linguist Ivan Zakharov and used in his important Manchu dictionary (1875) and grammar (1879).