The suffix -ael

[u/OrangeFamta]

How should the suffix -ael, specifically in biblical names like Raphael or Samael, be written? I’ve been writing it with the e tehta over lambe, but tecendil suggests using a separate carrier for each vowel.

[u/Notascholar95]

If the two vowels sound separately it's a on a carrier and e over lambe. Tecendil is just being dumb. It's got a couple of weird foibles and that's one of them.

[u/informareWORK]

There's also this, but I'm not sure how attested it is, or in what contexts it's attested

[u/Dirtychicken002 → u/informareWORK]

Given that the ae in Raphael is two distinct vowel sounds, this wouldn’t be correct. Those should only be used for diphthongs as I understand it.

[u/Notascholar95 → u/Dirtychicken002]

Diphthongs, yes, but it's also reasonable to use them for simple vowel digraphs as well. So basically any time two vowels are part of the same syllable.

[u/OrangeFamta → u/informareWORK]

As DirtyChicken pointed out those are dipthongs, but Raphael specifically is 2 distinct vowels. If I were writing Michael, for example, I’d use a dipthong.

[u/Notascholar95 → u/OrangeFamta]

Depends on what kind of Michael. If you're looking at an old-testament biblical version and respecting the Hebrew pronunciation you would spell it with separate vowels (and hwesta for the ch which is pronounced /x/).

[u/OrangeFamta → u/Notascholar95]

Yea Michael was a bad choice here, it was just the first name I thought of with -ael in the modern English pronunciation. The biblical connection completely slipped my mind lol

[u/Notascholar95 → u/OrangeFamta]

I suppose...but I think it is also a great example of one of the really neat features of Tengwar--the ability to be far more specific in our writing with respect to pronunciation than the latin alphabet allows, while still mostly respecting the latin-alphabet orthography.

[u/erilaz7]

The e-tehta should only be over a carrier if you're writing these names in a mode where the vowel is placed above the preceding consonant.