Sona language - Definition and Overview

Sona is an international auxiliary language created by Kenneth Searight and described in a book he published in 1935. The name in Sona means "auxiliary neutral [thing]", but was chosen to echo "sonority" or "sound".

Searight created Sona in response to the other artificial auxiliary languages of his time. According to him, Esperanto was too eurocentric, while more a priori languages like Solresol were unworkable. For this reason, Searight used inspiration from many diverse languages, primarily English and Chinese, 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.

External links

• Sona Language Lab (http://www.rick.harrison.net/langlab/sona.html)
• Sona Conlang Profile (http://www.langmaker.com/db/mdl_sona.htm)
• SonaUiki (http://s94851334.onlinehome.us/Main/Index)