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". The similarity to the English word 'sonorous' is superficial. 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. Searight specifically chose only sounds that speakers of many languages could say, therefore making it a true universal language. He hoped that in a perfect world, Sona would be taught to young children everywhere. Sona is an agglutinative language with a strong tendency towards being an isolating language. The language has 360 radicals or root words whose meanings are based on the categories in Roget's original thesaurus, plus an additional 15 particles. 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 published example of this language. There is a small community on the Internet interested in reviving and using Sona.
Writing Sona uses the Latin alphabet and contains 24 letters. Although the author provides the rules for writing in Sona in his text, he also specifies that Sona has "few hard and fast rules." One mentioned rule in regards to writing covered by Searight is that foreign words are written with a capital. Even in regards to punctuation, Searight claims it is "desirable that we leave the matter more or less opened to choice."
Alphabet
The Sona alphabet has 24 letters. Searight lists no official order but presents the following chart:
The vowels are sounded as in Italian. British English equivalents are fast, fete, machine, fort, rule. y is the neutral vowel of Welsh, but before another vowel, it is pronounced as the English y (e.g. yard). The alphabet letters are "named" by adding the vowel y. For the vowels of the alphabet, the y is initial, such as ya, ye, yi, yo, yu, y, and is final for aspirates and consonants, such as cy, gy, ky, etc. The y is also useful for separating two like vowels in a word and for separating an -n radical from a vowel. For instance, ta-ata becomes tayata and ta-o becomes tayo. This helps reduce confusion by distinguishing words from other similar combined radicals. i and u are shortened before a vowel. The only consonant that is final allowed is -n.
Radicals The language consists of 360 radicals and 15 particles, each of which represents a single unit of meaning. Every word in Sona can be decomposed into radicals and, conversely, new words can be constructed by combining them in various ways. Radicals are meant to represent symbolic ideas or groups of ideas, and this simplifies the language by connecting words to one another based on universal concepts. The radicals are organized into groups of five which share both a consonant-vowel root and a fundamental meaning. Each radical in the group is created by attaching a-, u-, or i- or -n. For example, the group ta (increase) also contains the radicals tan (bulk), ata (extension), ita (filling), and uta (swelling). When radicals are combined, their order affects the resulting meaning. A radical used as a prefix will be dominant, while one used as a suffix will be subordinate, hence tara "big man" versus rata "giant." A radical can change meaning depending on its context. Some radicals take on a different meaning when used as an affix, e.g. when used as a prefix, the meaning of ka changes from "lead" to a causal maker. Many compounds take on set meanings beyond that of their component parts. For example, akizu, literally "fast animal," signifies "horse."
Phonetics and phonology The 360 radicals are split up into consonants and aspirates. Of the 12 consonants, each can be categorized five different ways, isolated and with the four possible affixes. This gives us 300 radicals. The 6 aspirates, c, j, x, f, v, and h, have only the -n form, which gives us the remaining 60 radicals. Searight decided to exclude diphthongs from Sona in order to maintain its universality. Here is an example of how radicals are modified with prefixes and suffixes to create new words.
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