#mer language

Making up mer language takes time! I have basic guidelines about how it’d sound (lots of hums, tonal variation, all consonants voiced, very singsongy, and I’m avoiding grammar altogether at the moment). But then I’m left to fiddle with pronunciation, spelling, and cadence. It’s a lot of trial and error and minute changes.

The English alphabet doesn’t have symbols for some of the sounds I want to use and spelling conventions make them almost impossible to express. That ‘dh’ at the beginning is really meant to be a really soft ð (voiced th). But if I just used a ‘th’ someone might read it as θ (unvoiced), which would ruin the whole feel of the word. Then there are treacherously slippery vowels -- I tend to follow the Japanese or Hawaiian vowel pronunciation, which is more consistent than English.

So I feel out what sounds good, what has a good rhythm, what feels mer-y, and then I have to make these long strings of syllables not interfere with one another (especially when there’s an ‘e’ involved, it makes other letters read differently). I’ve decided to use double letters to kind of note where sounds may be stretched, dwelt upon, and so I count double consonants as their own syllable (where English requires a vowel). However, there is no clean way to mark syllable emphasis. I know what it sounds like in my head, but I must leave it to the reader to give it their best guess.

Now throw in a dash of synesthesia! This is something that has no discernible impact on reading, but for me, the colors of the letters have to look good! Sera Sophia’s mer name, Elweyennallah, is light green because it has a bunch of ‘e’s near the beginning, and the ‘l’s also keep it light. Very pretty and peaceful just like her. The word I’m making up this time needed to be darker, with tans and reds, which is why I used ‘a’s and ‘r’s. Since color associations are unique for each synesthete, even other people with letter-color synesthesia would see a totally different palette than what I have in mind. For all I know, someone might see Elweyenallah as a burning orange. Yet I must consider colors when making a word, or nothing else feels right.