I remember back when I was just a beginner in conlanging, I thought evidentials were the coolest thing ever. I feel like the time I stopped considering myself a beginner happened to coincide with me no longer using evidentials in my conlangs. I kinda wanna make a conlang that has them, now.
Anyone else feel this? Are there some features you feel this way about?
I’m reading that in Turkish, “the inferential suffix -miş is glossed as a direct evidential or a mirative.”
For example, Ali geldi (Ali came, and I witnessed it.) versus Ali gelmiĹź (Ali apparently came. I heard or inferred that Ali came.).
I think it’s just overdone nowadays, because everyone thinks (or thought) it’s cool, which strangely is how it lost its cool status. I’m not intimate with the Conlanging Scene:tm: enough to adequately gauge what’s fallen out of interest. personally as I became more experienced I just found myself liking features more rather than liking features less
i think it’s also partially to do with the fact that conlangs with an overly large inventory of affixes and word forms have kinda fallen out of fashion as a whole. especially with the growing number of toki pona speakers.
I really liked a lot of Láadan’s features, including evidentials, and also the -lh- thing where when you replace an l in a word by lh (or affix it to a word without l) it’s basically like “the damn X”.
lali ~ rain
lhali ~ damn rain
Yeah, there tend to be linguistic trends in the conlanging community, so we’re probably just on the other side of the hype. They are really cool though. I wonder if they could be implemented as illocutions 
The idea of implementing them as a mood suffix like Turkish does (as jan Sonja) is really cool, too, though.
Nice indeed.
For what it’s worth, my Nahaıwa has evidentiality marking fused with the assertive illocution. It has a rather extensive set of them, even.
Láadan’s evidentials also include this fantastic one:
we ~ (evid) Evidence Word: perceived by X in a dream
New Ithkuil had that one at one point. It was called ⟪Revelatory⟫ and defined as ⟪an assertion based on a dream, vision, altered mental state, or strong emotional or cognitive bias not based in reality.⟫. Later though its semantics were broadened and it was renamed ⟪Imaginary⟫.
I also think that evidentiality is rather cool. I’d like to incorporate that into the new conlang I’m making. (By “new”, I mean I have a phonology and that’s it.)
I actually feel the exact way; like my current conlang has no evidentials in it at all lmao?? my first conlang had like two dozen. I may add some evidential auxiliary verbs though, those are really cool.
When I looked at evidentials while making my main lang, I didn’t see an easy way to fit them onto my grammatical system. And it seemed that they would duplicate functionality available from adverbials and connectives. I left them out in order to finish off my exploration of the other ideas I thought were cool ten years earlier, like eliminating the adjective word class and making I everything could be verbs. I suppose that by leaving evidentials out, I’ve placed a responsibility on myself to establish a culture of usage in the language where you deliberately say where you got your beliefs from, rather than having the language make you do it. One thing that came out of my research into the topic was that I respect evidential constructions in English more. Things like “should be”, “it has to!”, “I think”. Like, “should” has one use as how things should behave (like toki pona’s “o”), but also another use referring to how things should be in the logical world as a result of the information you have. It’s a sense I couldn’t explain until I studied evidentiality marking.
I wonder if they could be implemented as illocutions
New Ithkuil’s evidentiality category is called Validation, and it is used with the default Assertive Illocution, and the categories of Illocution and Validation are often thought of together because of that, so that might interest you.
lojban’s imaginary journeys to where/when the event you’re talking about hold a special place in my heart. Also its abstraction types! And yeah I definitely remember feeling that way about evidentials too, but somehow they didn’t make as deep of an impact on my worldview (whereas journey-tenses and abstractions burrowed so deep into my brain that they still influenced me even when I hadn’t thought about lojban for years)