Sarati

Description

The sarati can be written in several directions, though the most prominent is from top to bottom. Others are left to right, right to left, and boustrophedon.

Each full character represents a consonant, while vowels are represented with diacritics (called tehtar in the terminology associated with the Tengwar). In Sarati, vowel signs are written to the left if the vowel comes before or to the right if after the consonants in vertical writing, above and below in the same principle 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".

Consonants

In accordance with the leading theory at the time, the consonants were created as the main characters of Sarati, while the role of vowels was secondary and were used to accentuate the consonants. It is important to note that the consonants, more so than the vowels, appear differently throughout the texts. Only the shapes of a select few sarati are stable, varying just slightly. The alterations of the shapes can be mostly attributed to Tolkien's constant work on the development of the script.

Vowels

As mentioned above, the role of the vowels was to emphasize linguistically and, possibly, aesthetically, the consonants of the script. Therefore, the vowels fill the role of diacritics, which can be pronounced either before or after the consonant. The vowel diacritics often can also double the sound or indicate an adjacent "s" or a preceding homorganic nasal. Though vowel diacritics vary considerably less frequently than the consonants, vowels had undergone considerable changes throughout the years.

Alignment

As Sarati was created for the Eldar who were known to be ambidextrous, the script is known to be written in the following directions:

A notable point is that when writing from right-to-left, the left hand would be employed, whereas when writing left-to-right, the right hand was used. This approach prevented the accidental smudging of ink as well as allowed the writer to see what he or she had just written. Also, as Sarati was meant to represent an older script, its distinguishing trait of allowing the script to be written in multiple directions is meant to mirror the more ancient scripts of our world that are known for their less formal nature.

Punctuation

While a fair amount of punctuation marks have been created for the script, Sarati has established only two punctuation marks (both of which serve as a period) that are used consistently throughout texts.