#sorry feanor i love you and i love the TH but it's gotta be said

[nimium-amatrix-ingenii-sui]

Thank you for asking! Although it’s a joke, it’s actually a very good question. Curiously enough, it wouldn’t be! When the Z sound disappeared from Quenya and was replaced by R, it was no longer represented by the ázë (then árë) Tengwa in writing but by rómen, which already existed for sounds that had been R all along. The newly vacant ázë/árë, clearly recogniseable by looks as related to silmë (i.e. the S sound), was then used to represent the frequent SS (which is technically the same sound as S but ??? for some reason spelled differently), because there’s no reason to let a perfectly fine Tengwa go to waste or use two S next to each other when you can stack them in a more aesthetically pleasing form. So basically, while azë became árë, words that formerly had the Z-sound in them were then spelled with rómen. Whereas words that have the SS-sound in them (which is actually the same as just regular S, a voiceless alveolar fricative) and ended up written with essë had already had that sound, it was just written differently. This shows that the Eldar are perfectly capable of making pragmatic decisions when it comes to their language, as long as nobody is getting unduly emotionally attached to any specific sounds

Ruthandol? How the everloving fuck would you come up with Ruthandol? There’s. There’s a reason that it’s written with a double-S. Means that it has shit fuck all to do with the TH -> S development (not to mention that… not all later Quenya S once were TH?! Some have always been S? silmë as an individual Tengwa exists? I mean, it’s a fairly significant sound in, IDK, Silmaril?!). The double-S in transcription represents a whole-ass Tengwa of its own (essë)? This isn’t even complicated or ambiguous it’s just… IDK? Revisionism? Hypercorrection? Pseudo-Fëanorian bullshit? I mean, you can name an OC Ruthandol (or rather, Rúthandol) because rúsë/rúthë “wrath” exists. It’s correct Quenya. But. It very much isn’t a valid form of Russandol (Don’t mind me, I’ve been reading the AMA with Bill Fliss and someone asked the poor man whether Ruthandol would be more correct than Russandol. He wisely abstained from answering and declared that he was out of his depth there. I, however, am not.)