Hi everyone.

What would be the correct phonetic way to spell out สุดยอดไปเลย

Would it be Sud Yod Pai Luey or Sud Yod Pai Loei

I asked my wife how one would spell it but she wasn't sure about the last word. She feels it would be the latter as that's how the town/city is spelt.

Thanks.

Short answer: Loei.

Long and boring answer: The "official" Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) would use Loei because, indeed, RTGS is used on all place names. There's no single transliteration system of Thai script that should be considered "correct". Many systems have been developed, especially because the RTGS is almost useless for working out how to actually pronounce words for non-Thai-speakers. For example, It does not show tone marks or vowel length, and merges several phonemes eg. initial consonants จ vs. ฉ, ช, ฌ are all rendered as "ch" even though จ is "j".

An example of a different rendering of สุดยอดไปเลย would be sùt-yɔ̂ɔt bpai ləəi using the Paiboon system that's used by the popular book "Thai for Beginners". The advantage of Paiboon vs. RTGS is that it is more accurate (unambiguous, can reconstruct the Thai script from it). The disadvantage is it uses funny characters outside the latin alphabet.

Hi cwr,

Thanks very much for both short and long answers. That's actually very interesting.

Thanks again.