 sarati is an artificial script created by j. r. r. tolkien. according to tolkien's mythology, the sarati alphabet was invented by the elf rÃºmil of tirion. == external history == as tolkien strove to create a world that would be as authentic as ours, he realized that for that to be possible, he must invent accompanying scripts for his languages. and, being a perfectionist, he acknowledged that a fully-fledged writing system could not have just appeared out of nowhere. therefore he set out to create a series of scripts for the elves as well as for the men and dwarves that would indicate a certain degree of evolution and development. the first script for the elves was the sarati which eventually developed into tengwar by fÃ«anor.'inside language' by ross smith (107) known as the first writing system of arda, sarati was invented by the Ãoldorin chronicler rÃºmil of valinor in the valian year of 1179. it was he "who first achieved fitting signs for the recording of speech and song"'the silmarillion' by j.r.r. tolkien (63) the writing system is officially called sarati as each letter of the script represents a "sarat". however, tolkien sometimes called the writing system âthe tengwar of rÃºmil", where the word "tengwar" means letters in quenya. sarati is the quenya name for rÃºmil's script. upon marrying and getting a job as an assistant on the oxford english dictionary (oed), tolkien began to keep a diary that was written exclusively using the "alphabet of rÃºmil". it has been described as a script that looks like a "mixture of hebrew, greek, and pitman's shorthand."'j.r.r. tolkien: a biography' by humphrey carpenter (51) unfortunately, there are no clues as to what writing systems influenced tolkien's scripts. this also might mean that his invented scripts found their origins from his mind alone. == internal history == the sarati can be written in several different 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 
Abugida_writing_systems Middle-earth_writing_systems Scripts_not_encoded_in_Unicode