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". An international auxiliary language (sometimes abbreviated as IAL or auxlang) is a language used (or to be used in the future) for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language. ... Kenneth Searight (born Arthur Kenneth Searight) (December, 1883 - 1957) was the creator of the international auxiliary language Sona. ... 1935 (MCMXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ...

Searight created Sona as a response to the Eurocentricity of other artificial auxiliary languages of his time, such as Esperanto and Ido. At the same time, Searight intended his language to be more practical than most a priori languages like Solresol or Ro, which were intended 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. Searight used inspiration from many diverse languages, including English, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and Japanese, to create his eclectic yet regular and logical language. Eurocentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European (and, generally, Western) concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures. ... An artificial or constructed language (known colloquially as a conlang among aficionados), is a language whose vocabulary and grammar were specifically devised by an individual or small group, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture as with natural languages. ... An international auxiliary language (sometimes abbreviated as IAL or auxlang) is a language used (or to be used in the future) for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language. ... Look up Esperanto in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Ido (pronounced ), a constructed language, was created to become a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds, easier to learn than any ethnic language. ... In the art of language construction, there are two ways to build a usable vocabulary. ... Solresol is an artificial language, devised by a Frenchman, Jean François Sudre, beginning in 1817. ... Ro is an a priori constructed language created by Rev. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The Arabic language ( ), or simply Arabic ( ), is the largest member of the family of Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew, Amharic, and Aramaic. ...

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". It has been suggested that Agglutination be merged into this article or section. ... An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and considered to be full-fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ... The word thesaurus is derived from 16th century New Latin, in turn from Latin thesaurus, from ancient Greek thesauros, store-house, treasury. Besides its meaning as a treasury or storehouse, it more commonly means a listing of words with similar, related, or opposite meanings (this new meaning of thesaurus dates...

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.

London (pronounced ) is the capital city of the United Kingdom and the largest city of England (strangely, England has no constitutional existence within the United Kingdom, and therefore cannot be said to have a capital). ... 1935 (MCMXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ...

External links

• Sona Meetingplace - includes an HTML version of nearly the entire Sona book, originally published in 1935.
• Sona Conlang Profile
• SonaUiki
• IALS - links to Sona
• Sona Mailing List