Sona language
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Sona is an international auxiliary language created by Kenneth Searight and described in a book he published in 1935. The word Sona in the language itself means "auxiliary neutral [thing]", but the name was also chosen to echo "sonority" or "sound".
Searight created Sona as a response to the Eurocentricity of other artificial auxiliary languages of his time, such as Esperanto. At the same time, Searight intended his language to be more practical than most a priori languages like Solresol, which were created (at least consciously) to be unbiased by any particular group of natural languages. Thus, Sona sacrificed familiarity of grammar and lexicon for some measure of "universality", while at the same time preserving basic notions common to grammars around the world such as compounding as a method of word formation. For this reason, Searight used inspiration from many diverse languages, including English, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and Japanese, to create his ecclectic yet regular and logical language.
Sona is an agglutinative language with a strong tendency towards being an isolating language. The language has 375 radicals or root words -- based on the terms in Roget's original thesaurus. Ideas and sentences are formed by juxtaposing the radicals. Thus, ra "male" plus ko "child" makes rako "boy".
Searight's book, Sona; an auxiliary neutral language (London, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1935, LCCN: 35016722) is the only example of this language. There is a small community on the Internet interested in reviving and using Sona.
References
Searight, Kenneth. Sona: an auxiliary neutral language. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935.
External links
- Sona Language Lab (http://www.rick.harrison.net/langlab/sona.html) - includes an HTML version of nearly the entire Sona book, originally published in 1935.
- Sona Conlang Profile (http://www.langmaker.com/db/mdl_sona.htm)
- SonaUiki (http://s94851334.onlinehome.us/Main/Index)
- IALS - links to Sona (http://www.freewebs.com/flowingfree/languageslinguistics.htm#47146989)de:Sona