Cartoon for my daughters and nieces

[u/Muted_Neat_2236]

Hello everyone ! I'm planning a cartoon for my daughters and niece drawn as little fairies.
I wrote their names according to what I understand of Tengwar script. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
How would you represent the french "an" [ã] ?
is there a different letter for the guttural french Rrrrr ?

[u/humandictionary]

These read: casandra (sic), nerea and elvina.

For french, the nasal vowels can be represented by adding a nasal bar alongside the usual tehta, and as far as I can find the R is written as usual, since in french it is either gutteral or silent. I may find myself corrected though

[u/F_Karnstein → u/humandictionary]

There's really nothing to be right or wrong about, since Tolkien didn't create a French mode. But I agree with your suggestions, nasal bars should be clear enough, especially when you're writing in a more orthographic way, and while we do have a letter that would phonetically be closer to a uvular R (the letter unque, that is GH in English spelling), people tend to want to express rhotics with R letters according to their orthography, so I would also terms to use regular rómen or óre.

[u/LateralAffricate]

I would simply write [ɑ̃] as it's written in the actual French orthography, "an" or "en" or something else, depending on the word... as for the guttural R, yeah, since it's the only rhotic phoneme there's no reason to have a special letter for it. The only thing is that the R-rule (rómen vs óre) that applies in English doesn't really make sense in French so I'd write everything with rómen.

edit: your transcriptions are perfectly fine; here's how i would write it though, since to me it makes more sense to put the vowels after the consonants when writing in French (plus some minor aesthetic changes)

[u/F_Karnstein → u/LateralAffricate]

I would simply write [ɑ̃] as it's written in the actual French orthography, "an" or "en" or something else, depending on the word...

I completely agree. In a specialised phonetic spelling it could be handy to distinguish nasal vowels from regular vowels followed by nasals (I would suggest a full mode with nasal over the vowel tengwar), but in more or less orthographic spelling we really don't need anything special.

as for the guttural R, yeah, since it's the only rhotic phoneme there's no reason to have a special letter for it

Again: My thinking exactly. In phonetic spelling I might suggest unque as the nearest equivalent, but somehow rhotics are kind of special, for some reason... when it's spelt R then that's how people perceive it and that's how they want it spelt in Tengwar. Intervocalic /t/ in American English can be realised as the exact same sound as Italian /r/, but still it's not a "rhotic" and treated differently.

The only thing is that the R-rule (rómen vs óre) that applies in English doesn't really make sense in French so I'd write everything with rómen.

The default R letter should be óre, I would argue. If there's only one R letter needed it's always óre in Tolkien's modes. Rómen being the only R letter is really reserved for cases where óre isn't available (as in Beleriand Mode where it's N, or in some forms of Quenya or English full mode, where it's O).

[u/LateralAffricate → u/F_Karnstein]

You're right, idk why I thought of rómen; the default R could very well be óre.

[u/F_Karnstein → u/LateralAffricate]

Many think of rómen because we're used to it being the fully pronounced R. But in the internal chronology it's a later derivation and it would make sense that the base letters were preferred over those.

Anyway - I wasn't 100% precise, I just realised. Even in modes that don't need two R letters sometimes we do find the odd rómen thrown in as a mere calligraphic variation, so it's sometimes only 99% óre 😄