Last modified: 2017-12-23 by antónio martins
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ale
The 1935 artificial language project Sona includes the word "flag" in its thesaurus, and an online dictionary gives (unsourcedly) two translations: "ale" and "royale" — of which the latter is most probably a derivation of the former, given the agglutinative nature of Sona’s word forming process.
An online dictionary in the opposite direction (Sona-English) gives: «ale n. sign; mean; flag; crest.». Under "royale" (with colored "y", suggesting "ro+y+ale"), it says simply «royale flag». Under "ro" it says «ro n. colour; dye; paint.», and in the 1935 book Sona : an auxiliary neutral language at III.§8. it is said that although «y is the neutral vowel of Welsh, A. a, F. e in ‘me’.», «Before another vowel it has the value of E. y in yard, yea, ye, yore, yule. y has been included in the alphabet (i) to provide an euphonic, separating two like vowels, or two hard vowels (a, e, o) e.g. ta-ata = tayata, ta-o = tayo».
Therefore "royale" means litterally something like "colored symbol", which is interesting from the point of view of the semantics of "flag" in the circumstances of attempted objective systematics (something usual in aprioristic artificial language projects, which though are very rare after the mid 19th century).
How much "ale" was inspired by Arabic "ʕᵃlᵃm" etc. is a good question I cannot reply.
António Martins, 03 Apr 2010
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