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AN AUXILIARY NEUTRAL LANGUAGE

What is Sona?

Sona is an invented language with a vocabulary of only 375 root-words (called “radicals”) and particles. By forming compounds of these ‘radicals’ a person can supposedly express any commonplace idea they would want to express. Imagine as if you were connecting puzzle pieces. Connecting various, broader ideas together helps speakers of Sona to form more complex ideas. This type of made-up language, which tries to do as much as possible with a small vocabulary, is classified as ‘oligosynthetic.’ Different people have different feelings about the practicality of these language designs.

Sona is mainly an a priori language. Sona's creator, a polyglot and amateur linguist, drew grammatical principles from a number of sources: Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Pashto, 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 the creator 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.

I came across this language in July 2020 from a now deleted youtube video rating the auxlang. Beforehand, I had been a pretty renown Toki Pona speaker, but eventually switched to Sona since Toki Pona’s ambiguity, while playful, made it difficult to clearly say more complex words.

The Book

The original published book, often dubbed “The Book” was published in 1935 by Kenneth Searight and contains the creator’s thought process and construction of Sona.

VIEW THE PDF

(Courtesy of Paul O’Bartlett)

Be wary that there is a possibility that some elements of Sona compared to the Book may be outdated as viewed by the Sona community. It is important to keep track of changes made to the language.

Communities

Come join the Sona Sojigi Discord server!

Learning Resources

Expect more resources to be produced with coming time!

Frog ge Toad

Frog and Toad | I Can Read Books | ICanRead.com The Frog and Toad series was written by Arnold Lobel. Below are his books translated in Sona. These books were written for children. They are easy reads with cute plots and illustrations. Click the links below to get a read!

Frog ge Toad zi soji

Frog ge Toad soyu

Frog ge Toad pan tori

dirie so Frog ge Toad

juri, Jonathan!

Man With A Backpack PNG Transparent Images Free Download | Vector Files | Pngtree juri, Jonathan! (Hello, Jonathan!) is the story of a young Englishman who goes to visit his friend in another European country...or so it would seem. It was first originally written entirely in the language Occidental (Interlingue), a language created by Edgar de Wahl from Tallinn (Estonia) that he published in 1922. The book Salute, Jonathan! was written by Mithridates and published on Wikibooks in 2019. There are a total of 100 chapters.

Click here to start reading!

COMPLETION STATUS

6/100

Sona Rewritten (Version 1.0)

I have taken upon myself the responsibility to rewrite the Sona book, as the original can be difficult to digest for some beginners, given the Book was published almost 100 years ago. I choose to include more sections such as derivations of Sona radicals, and additional reading exercises, while making the book more cohesive as a whole.

Check back for the available PDF!

COMPLETION STATUS

Almost done!

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