Ok, more stuff— still not much on the actual language but here's some more background information.

The historical setting is as follows. The barren plains of Arghia were once populated only by the noble savages of the Arghic linguistic group. Then, at some apex of its power, the Turenian empire of the south temporarily occupied an area further from the headwaters in the mountains than usual, and developed the region. Eventually the Arghians drove them out, but by then the damage was done: they had become civilized... or at least, the urbanized ones had. The subsequent Arghish kingdoms in the area thus had a literate chancellory, scholarly and priestly caste, etc. inherited from the Turenian occupation. I imagine there was some point of sensitivity over whether the Arghish kings of this era were "true" to their "roots", much like the successors of Chinggis Qaghan. This is where the attitude from the above minisketch comes from concerning the people to the north, about them preserving the ways of the ancestors. They speak Outer Arghic languages.

SO, the sociolinguistics are this. In the early period the literati just wrote in Turenian. Later they wrote in a standardized version of Arghish based on Old Arghish but with heavy influence from Turenian. However, the Turenian-based writing system was inadequate and writers eventually realized they had been importing pronunciation from the colloquial language (Middle Arghish at this time) but still spelling things as in Old Arghish. So there was a restandardization, which involved spelling words phonetically (and no longer pretending they were still writing Old Arghish) and being more lax about introducing colloquial words into the written standard. Here's a diagram: http://i.imgur.com/Iu35I4a.png

(I'm not really worrying about the Modern Arghish dialects or whatever developments led to them. When I write a "spoken Arghish" example in this post, it's mostly just a comparison of a native inherited form vs. a borrowed literate form, and might not actually match spoken colloquial Middle or Modern Arghish.)

I got the basic idea when reading about Written Oirat. The author wrote that in their belief, Written Oirat represents the Oirats' pronunciation tradition of Classical Mongolian, which they at one point decided to put to writing and to depart from the Classical Mongolian written standard. See, conlangers seem to often want to make "Classical" languages, but I think that's just 'cause it sounds classy and cool. But the actual idea of a "classical" language has a bit more potential, because they often are artificial. So the focus conlang for me is "Neoclassical Arghish"— the restandardized written form I mentioned in the earlier paragraph. I have no idea how much traction I'll get out of this idea, though.

Here's one example of the kind of thing the Neoclassical language would do that the forms of the language less infected by the written form wouldn't. Ordinarily Arghish modifiers follow their head but are in turn followed by a subordinating particle which agrees in noun class with the head of the phrase:

Where -z, -l, and -š agree with hawk/head, mountain, and life respectively. The SUB particle derives from a pronoun— the class suffix in prior stages was suffixed directly to the modifying noun or adjective. It also works for relative clauses.

The Turenian language, however, didn't like this. So, much as Sumerian made Akkadian into an SOV language, Turenian introduced an alternate construction— ungrammatical in colloquial Arghish— into written Arghish based on the modifying particle preceding the modifier. It affected both modified noun phrases:

and relative clauses

Also, subordinating clauses. For example, if-clauses. The native way to do this is to subordinate the clause with an irrealis subordinator followed by the "then, therefore" coordinator:

Turenian used subordinating conjunctions that preceded the subclause. Written Arghish borrowed this subordinator and produced a modified form of an if-clause:

Where both the inflected subordinate particle and the "then, therefore" coordinator may either or both be absent.

The phonaesthetic influences I am trying to draw inspiration from are Black Speech, Classical Mongolian, and Middle Persian.