Sarati

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Sarati
Type	Abugida
Spoken languages	Quenya
Created by	J. R. R. Tolkien
Time period	V.Y. 1179-
Child systems	Tengwar
ISO 15924	`Sara`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Sarati is an artificial script which was created by J. R. R. Tolkien. In his mythology, the Sarati alphabet was invented by Rúmil of Tirion in Valinor. When Fëanor created the later Tengwar script, more ubiquitous both in Middle-earth and in real life, he modeled it after the Sarati. Unlike the Tengwar and Tolkien's other Elvish alphabet, the Cirth, the Sarati is written in several different directions, though the most prominent is from top to bottom. Others are left to right, right to left, and boustrophedon.

As in the later Tengwar, each full character represents a consonant, while vowels are represented with diacritics (called tehtar in the terminology associated with the Tengwar). In the Sarati, vowel signs are written to the left (or sometimes right) of the consonants in vertical writing, above (and sometimes below) in horizontal writing. According to Tolkien, consonants were considered more salient than vowels, and vowels were considered merely modifiers. When writing Quenya, the sign for "a" is usually omitted, as it is the most common vowel in Quenya. This makes Sarati an abugida with an inherent vowel of "a".

[edit] References

Martínez, Helios De Rosario. "Rúmilian Numerals." Tengwestië (2007).
Smith, Arden R. "The Alphabet of Rúmil." Parma Eldalamberon 13 (2001).
Smith, Arden R. "The Túrin Prose Fragment: An Analysis of a Rúmilian Document." Vinyar Tengwar 37 (1995): 15-23.
Smith, Arden R., Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr. "The Semiotics of the Writing Systems of Tolkien's Middle-Earth." In Semiotics around the World: Synthesis in Diversity, I-II, ed. Irmengard Rauch, 1239-42. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997.