Greetings

I'll be using this blog to work out changes in my conlangs. Currently the one I'm working on is mërèchi, perhaps soon to be known as mirexu, hence the URL of my all-mërèchi in-language blog: mirexu.blogspot.com.

mërèchi started out life when I was 13, and has been my first, longest-running, and most personal conlang. However, what it has not been is rigorous, realistic, and free from unwanted English influences. So I am trying to take it in a new direction - changing it from a quirky, idiosyncratic, badly-spelled personal language, into more of a LostLang-like form.

In this first post I will briefly outline two fixes for the benighted orthography of mërèchi (to see how, well, naive it is, check out here; ignore the half-baked reform at the bottom). The first is absolutely crucial: a native script. Putting the words in their own native script demotes the orthography to a mere transliteration scheme, and I have already come up with a reasoable excuse for the transliteration scheme: blame dead people! I have invented a 19th-century missionary-linguist upon whose ignorance I can place the blame for the orthography (see here).

But to go further, I feel the need to distance the "new" mërèchi from the old, in order to be able to scrap some of the things that will need scrapping. So there will be some sound changes. In order of certainty (from things I am committed to implementing down to wild speculation), they are:

• the endings -i and -a change to -u and -e
  
• other unstressed vowels change cyclically, i -> u -> o -> a -> e -> i
  
• unstressed final ai -> O (this is X-SAMPA for the "short" o, or an aw sound)
  
• unstressed final ue -> we
  
• more restrictive rules for consonant clusters
  
• maybe all the vowels change as above. Note that this still leaves /E/ and /O/ unchanged.
  
• possibly degrade labial consonants: Cp/pC -> p -> b -> v -> w, f -> h -> 0.

Well, that's all for now. Stay tuned for more ramblings!