Originally Posted by
Silent Orange
I was being facetious but thank you for the explanation... two questions though
1. Regarding H: what do you mean when you say "the letter is pronounced aspirated"? Can you give an example?
2. If there are, at times, no literal transliteration guidelines, why is it wrong to say Ps and Bs are used interchangeably?
Listen to the difference when you speak 'Thailand' vs 'torrent'. The former is aspirated, there's a release of breath concurrent with the pronunciation, and the latter is a crisper sound.
It's wrong to mix up Ps and Bs because there are 2 Ps, 1 B and another letter pronounced as a hard sounding hybrid. (There are also aspirated Ps such as you'll find in Phuket.) Is it ok to interchange Bs and Ds in English? They can sound similar.
Now if the letter is at the end of the word, where you might indeed find the B representation
บ, it would be pronounced as P, not B.
Take the word
ลาบ, laap, the tasty meat salad. Quite often you'll find it transliterated as 'larb, even through there's no 'R' in the word. The middle letter is the long vowel 'ah', which some represent as 'aa' and others as 'ar'. Also the final letter is B but at the end of the word it's pronounced as P.
Actually this simple word represents a lot of what is wrong with the current transliterations. Those who write 'larb' literally transcribe the final letter but oddly represent, IMO, the vowel. Then there's 'laap' which accurately represents the pronunciation of the final letter, but not it's written style.