Sarus (language)

Sarus is an artificial language created by the Macromedia Flash animator Adam Phillips.

Construction

Sarus consists of syllables which, when communicated, consist of symbols, tones, numbers, colors, gestures, or portions of a glyph. Its concept is based heavily on Solresol, 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 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 of the most used English language words. 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 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.

ee also

*Adam Phillips
*Brackenwood- the world created and brought to life in animated web episodes by Adam Phillips
* [http://www.biteycastle.com/525/01_intro.html Sarus Lessons] - introduction to learning Sarus