5. Gréellen

Today, we’ll be looking at Éa Gréellen Lìngwha (edit: link), or the Grellen Language. This language, "based on Greek and Latin languages", was created by /u/Felix_g4.

Phonology

Consonants

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Plosive	p b~mp /p b/		t d~nt /t d/	çh ǧke~ǧǧe~ǧki~ǧǧi /c ɟ/	k~ck g~ǧk x /k ɡ ks~ɡs/	q /qj/
Affricate				č j~dz~zz /tʃ dʒ/
Fricative	f v~ff /f v/	th dh /θ ð/	s z	ş~sch~sh ž /ʃ ʒ/	ǧ /ɣ/	ç /χ/	h
Nasal	m		n	ni /ɲ/	ng /ŋ/
Liquid	w		r rr l ll /r ɾ l ɭ/	y li /j ʎ/

Also, c is pronounced either /k/ or /s/.

A nitpick about the orthography: ş for /ʃ/ is inconsistent with the rest of the postalveolars, especially considering that ç represents a completely different sound. Use š instead. Equally, çh doesn’t make sense for /c/.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i ë y /i ɪ iː/	ü /ʉ/	u ï /u ɯ/
Mid	e ö /e œ/	ar~er~or /ə/	o /o/
Low	ä /æ/	a ÿ /a aɪ/

Ignoring the unnaturalistic plethora of vowels, let’s look at something else strange: /i/ seems to be the only vowel with a length distinction.

The letters a e i o u y receive the acute, grave, tilde or circumflex accent if they are stressed. The grave is used between two consonants that are pronounced, the acute is used if one of the consonants around it is not pronounced or it is at the beginning of the word, and the circumflex accent in monosyllabic words when the consonants aroud it are both pronounced. (I don’t know why those three use three different diacritics. The tilde is used in diphthongs. The end result is that the language looks something like this: Ésa paĩsi pêr mía Bàlla lüdrair.

Wait, you’ve gotta at least cover phonotactics…

Grammar

Verbs are conjugated for person and number (but only present-tense conjugations are listed right now? I’m guessing /u/Felix_g4 is going to add conjugations for other tenses soon. Anyway, the verb for "to be" is irregular.

Nouns are declined for three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter 😒), two numbers (singular and plural 😒) and four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative). Yep, this reeks of SAE.

Wait, no syntax? No dependent clauses? Not even so much as an example of text?

Verdict

The fact that the phonology section takes more space than the grammar section in this post says something about the language, and it is not something good.

Phonology-wise, I’d consider reducing the enormous vowel inventory somewhat or adding some sort vowel harmony. I’d also consider the phonotactics of this language; if you don’t cover it, then expect more experienced leviant to roast you like a peanut.

The morphology of this language is pretty SAE. This isn’t a bad path to go in with your first language, but in the future, you’re going to want to explore new ways of doing things. Have you heard of ergative-absolutive alignment? I’m going to simplify this a lot (to the dismay of the more seasoned), but nominative-accusative (the one you’re using here) treats the agent of a transitive verb the same as the subject of an intranstive verb. Ergative-absolutive alignment treats the patient of a transitive verb the same as the subject of an intranstive verb (the absolutive case) and the agent of a transitive verb differently (ergative case).

Maybe nouns or verbs can ignore a certain category in morphology and assign the task to particles or periphrasis, or, in the other direction, mark categories that weren’t marked before. Again, I’m not saying that you have to implement these ideas into Gréellen right now, but if all of your future languages start looking the same grammatically, you’re doing it wrong.