Sarus is an artificial language created by the Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...

 animator Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips (animator)

Adam Phillips is an Australian freelance animator whose online alias is Chluaid . His main body of animation work, for which he is best known, consists of flash animation compositions published on his website and on the flash portal Newgrounds...

.

Construction

Sarus consists of syllables which, when communicated, consist of symbols, tones, numbers, colors, gestures, or portions of a glyph

Glyph

A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....

. Its concept is based heavily on Solresol

Solresol

Solresol is an artificial language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827. He published his major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, in 1866, though he had already been publicizing it for some years...

, an artificial language developed in France early in the 19th Century.

Sarus primarily uses the phonetic or abbreviated representation of the tonal syllables. The tones exist as the solfege

Solfege

In music, solfège is a pedagogical solmization technique for the teaching of sight-singing in which each note of the score is sung to a special syllable, called a solfège syllable...

 set of Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, and Ti (equivalent to musical notes C – D – E – F – G – A – B). In Sarus, these are abbreviated to d, r, m, f, s, l, t.

Words in Sarus consist of a series of uninterrupted syllables, for example: "mls" (music), "sds" (number) "mfsl" (hills) and so forth. A word may also be expressed as a whole heptagonal glyph.

The language currently (as of 2006) consists of around 1300 words, corresponding to those most used in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

. Its earliest version was called B525. In the language itself, the numbers 525 represent the syllables So Re So, written "srs" (language). This is from where the name "Sarus" is derived.

Origin

Sarus was created as a language for the fictional race called the YuYu, a mysterious group of interdimensional travellers in the Brackenwood

Brackenwood

Brackenwood is a series created by Adam Phillips, webmaster of the website. It currently includes a continuing series of short Flash animations about the inhabitants of a small fictional forest planet called Brackenwood...

Universe. Yuyus can speak Sarus or communicate by flashing their eyes in different colors, as they also are a form of Sarus, representing letters.

Application

Phillips has stated he will use Sarus to insert hidden messages into his animations. In his animation Little Foot, Phillips integrated 20 hidden messages and secrets, many of them involving Sarus, and challenged viewers to find them.

External links

• Sarus Lessons - introduction to learning Sarus