User blog comment:Eçeþesi/Judging! – August14 Speedlang Challenge/@comment-2040889-20140903074844

Ah, so let's write up a wall of text.

All of these are my personal opinions, findings and thoughts about the language. None of this is influenced by the identity of the author behind the languages. Voting based on interpersonal interactions is, to be frank, extremely distasteful. I rate the languages on criteria of naturalness.

First of all, I toss a (-1) to Ødilaaife for several reasons. First of all, I believe the author doesn't understand the concept of a declension; in natural languages, declensions are just groups of nominal words that have declensions resembling one another. Gender in declensions in natural languages is of a secondary nature as gendered languages with declensions still require you to learn the gender of each noun - for example, in Latin we have "nauta/nautӕ" (sailor), a first-declension noun that is anyhow masculine, and "alvus/alvī" (diarrhoea, bowels) which is feminine - while in Ødilaaife knowing a noun's declension seems to imply always knowing its gender. Second, the language features a too-regular and too-straightforward verb system that is extremely uncharacteristic of its complexity: all personal suffixes are just one vowel and additional inflections are just extensive consonant gradations of such a large extent that I don't remember any language having that many consonant alternations or even that they were that regular. Even the various Saami languages which have baroque consonant gradation (North Saami has four distinctive consonant lengths which alternate with each other in really vaguely connected circumstances) do not feature that mixture of straightforwardness, regularity and complexity.

Secondly, I toss a (-1) to Ahise for similar but not identical reasons to why I gave Ødilaaife the same vote. Its verb conjugation is also extremely straightforward though much better than Ødilaaife's. The tense-mood affix matrix has almost every cell be marked with one consonantal suffix (with the exception of the subjunctive present which is a suffixed syllable) but the personal/aspectual inflection part of it is really well thought out IMHO. I am really put off by the noun inflection part of it as it is moderately suspicious (all case-number combinations are unique and not very distinctive from one another, except for the vocalic paucal inessive and plural genitive, AFAICT) and on a whole feels really rigid, but I guess it's not complete. The phonology is also really suspicious, with extremely unlikely allophonies (ts > dz / a__, for one) and I suggest the author look into that.

EDIT: I'll finally toss a (-1) to Wexelgwe for the opposite reason of the vote for Ødilaaife: it barely looks like a language, more like a random keyboard mash with a few strategically-placed vowels here and there. I don't even have to do an in-depth analysis on this as the word "kurxqyxxxxurnxegaw" speaks for itself.

For this reason, I am going to revise my vote on Ahise to give it zero points/abstain from voting on it as it isn't actually that bad. Ødilaaife still gets a -1 :\

In addition to that, I am going to instead give that -1 to Ggän for a practically impossible phonology (an unholy amount of diphthongs and triphthongs, a fully voicelessly aspirated voiced fricative, a rounded labiodental fricative /fᶣ/ etc.), a morphosyntactic alignment system that is either improperly explained as a tripartite system but is instead either a split-ergative system or just plain impossible, a hideous orthography (<§/ß> for /β/??), and some other minor stuff I won't go into detail on right now. This is all said keeping in mind that I had told the author what his mistakes that contradict linguistic definitions were with him either ignoring the remarks or plain dismissing them.

EDIT2: As I've thought about it and concluded that, in all, Ødilaaife isn't really quite that deserving of a negative vote, I've decided to toss a (+1) (EEP A PRO-VOTE?) for Likubenge Loduha. The presentation is unholy bad but other than that it actually does manage to draw a lot from Japanese whilst still staying completely unique. It's, besides that horrible layout, extremely pleasing to see something like that work so well.

Likubenge Loduha +1 Ggän -1 Wexelgwe -1