The sarati of Rúmil are a fictitious written form, created by the writer J.R.R. Tolkien. Each sign is a sarat (in the plural sarati , in the language Quenya imagined by Tolkien, of a root *SAR or *SYAR meaning “  inciser  ”).

External history

The sarati constitute the first written form invented by Tolkien, roughly between 1919 and the middle of the Twenties.

Internal history

In works of fiction of Tolkien, the invention of the sarati is allotted to Rúmil Tirion in Valinor. When Fëanor created the alphabet Tengwar , largely employed in the Ground of the Medium, it did it while taking as a starting point the sarati .

Description

The sarati form before a whole phonographic system, where each sign represents a distinct phoneme. Each language can use the subset of the sarati which corresponds to the phonemes which characterize it. In one of our sources, Tolkien defines the sarati like a “  alphabetical system universel  ” for the writing of its elfic languages (but also, a fortiori , of any other language).

Contrary to the tengwar and the other alphabet elfic of Tolkien, the Cirth , the direction of writing of the sarati is variable. They could be written from top to bottom (while starting on the left or on the right), from left to right, from right to left, or finally alternatively from left to right and from right to left (in Boustrophédon ). Optionally, the signs could also be arranged along a continuous, vertical or horizontal bar.

As in the alphabet tengwar , each complete character represents a consonant, the vowels being represented by Diacritique S (called tehtar in the terminology associated with the tengwar ). In the sarati , the signs of the vowels are generally written on the left consonants (sometimes on the right) in the vertical writing, and below (sometimes above) in the horizontal writing.