On the bright side, all the hours I put into it have resulted in four nominations for "Language of the Month" on CWS and have heard all sorts of nice things from some people already.
But on the other side of things I also received a bit of criticism today, that the language is despite my efforts to undo my initial attempts of creating as many derivations from a few roots (hey, I was new to conlanging and fascinated by derivation etymologies...) still to regular and can come across as artificial. Seeing as I, too, have the goal of developing a somewhat naturalistic language, this felt a bit disheartening, but I thought could maybe get some advice here to help me with that.
I have a lot of documentation on CWS already, but I think I'll copy it here one by one, as it's still relatively compact.
First some information about the nation/people I'm developing the language for, and which thus served as a inspiration for the language:
Inspiration
- Compact phonology with just five base vowels and nine consonants (+ two allophones, and some diphthongs)
- Tagalog-like Austronesian alignment combined with a split ergativity inspired by English ergative verbs (such as to break, open, melt)
- Various marked moods, such as Indicative, Imperative, Conditional, Subjunctive and Hortative
- No distinct passive voice (triggers and ergativity used instead), tense, number (except in some pronouns), articles or adjectives (nouns used)
- Three genders, one for common/civilization-related words, one for abstract, immaterial, and most general, unknown or unknowable words, and one for all wilderness-related words, especially the rainforest and the ocean.
- A sizeable number of personal pronouns, featuring four clusitivity distinctions, three/four numbers, three animacy distinctions and gendered inanimate prononus
- No possessive pronouns or genitive. Inalienable possession is indicated with "a", signifying "of" or "by", alienable possession with relative nominalizations