Sona is a ConstructedLanguage created by KennethSearight (1883-1957). It is defined in his 1935 book Sona: an auxiliary neutral language. Though Searight received some interest in the proposal, the language was not at all popular at the time. There's no indication that any active movement around Sona existed during his lifetime, nor that any other Sona material was created.
The language was saved from obscurity by RickHarrison and a group of contributors known as the Sona sojigi? (Friends of Sona), who transcribed the SonaBook and put it on the World Wide Web in 2002. Although microscopic, the Sona community continues to grow.
Origins
Sona is mainly an a priori language. Searight, a polyglot and amateur linguist, drew grammatical principles from a number of sources: Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Pushtu (an Afghan language), Persian, English, French, Russian, Italian, and Indo-European roots.
It is perhaps unique in languages constructed at the time in incorporating principles from Asian languages as well as European ones -- a characteristic Searight hoped would attract Eastern as well as Western speakers. It does not lean upon any African, American, or Australian languages, but does seem to have influence of Polynesian ones, at least in choice of vowel sounds.
Searight was a British army officer who served in India, Iraq, and Egypt with British and native troops. His experience with soldiers' argot and pidgins in those countries seems to have influenced Sona as well, as it has a very simple pidgin-like grammar.
Searight also claims to have been inspired by RogetsThesaurus, particularly Roget's suggestion that the 1000 terms in the original thesaurus could be codified to make an artificial language.
Language overview
Sona is an agglutinative language. It has a lexicon of 375 radicals or ideograms (Searight's term).
Although Sona is written with Latin characters, Searight compared each radical to Chinese (or Japanese) ideograms: indivisible elements of meaning.
Phonetically the language uses 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u), pronounced as in Spanish or Italian, and 18 consonants (g, k, d, t, z, s, m, n, b, p, l, r, j, c, h, x, v, f), pronounced as in English with the exception of x ("sh") and c ("ch"). An additional semivowel y is used to smoothe the junctures between radicals.
Each radical is mono- or di-syllabic, in the form CV (ex: to), VCV (ato), or CVn (ton). Only a, i, and u are used before a consonant to make a radical, and no disyllabic radical is made with the consonants j, c, h, x, v, or f. An additional set of radicals, of the form V (i), Vn (on), and uV (uo), round out the lexicon. Radicals are always written in lowercase, and punctuation is mostly avoided and unspecified, except for terminal period (".").
Searight leans on Arabic grammar to divide the language into noun, particle, and verb. Each radical can play any one of these roles, although most have a "primary" substantive, particular, or verbal nature.
The language has an SVO format. So with xe cat, den bite, jan rat, and ru go we have:
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- xe den jan. The cat bites the rat.
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- jan den xe. The rat bites the cat.
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- xe ru. The cat leaves.
Like many pidgins, Sona depends heavily on context, and leaves out whenever possible grammatical markers for number and gender of nouns, as well as verb tense. There is no matching for adjectives with nouns by number or gender. Articles are rarely used, and personal pronouns and the verb "to be" (zi) are left out when possible, also.
More complex words are made by joining two or more radicals together, with the base radical at the end and modifying radicals preceding it (compare to English compound nouns: "housedog" vs. "doghouse"). Thus ra male plus nin offspring makes ranin son. The mechanism for making compounds is also used to mark parts of speech or give verbs tense and mood.
The compounds are not exhaustively specific. From ira strong and jen metal we get irajen iron. Although iron is not the only strong metal, convention maps certain combinations to specific words. For further specificity, Latin names for species and genus are used for animals, and elemental symbols for materials.
Place and personal names, as well as some foreign words, are incorporated as-is. Non-Sona words use initial capital letters to distinguish them from Sona; e.g. an na sa laba ci Ruso She does not speak Russian.
Auxlang or artlang?
Although the language was originally conceived as an international auxiliary language (IAL), its lack of speakers and organized advocacy groups makes it a long shot at best in that competitive arena. Esperantists, Interlinguists and Glosists should feel little competition from Sona.
The language's aesthetic characteristics, sonority, and pleasant simplicity, however, make it a delight to study, learn and use. As an introduction to language creation, or simply to learning and using constructed languages, there are worse languages than Sona.
Reference material
The original Sona book contains a grammar, a lexicon for the 375 radicals, and a Basic English-to-Sona dictionary. (Sona may have been the first of many constructed languages that used (or misused?) Basic for a base dictionary.) Some examples of using the language are given.
This wiki also contains the beginnings of a fuller dictionary, a more exhaustive examination of each radical, and a tutorial.
A few example texts are also available, as well as a group journal in Sona. In the future, translated and original works should also be available here.
Web resources
This page comes from the SonaUiki, a WikiWiki for promoting and developing reference material for Sona. In addition, the following links may be helpful: