" - yes, that seems like exactly the kind of mistake that clever people trying to invent a language that evolved without seeing any languages that evolved would make, obvious from our side but not from theirs. Sitting in the palace trying to extrapolate trees won't get you anything even remotely resembling a tree, though I'm sure it gets you something fascinating in its own right, and I'll pay you for that too.
You might think with thousands of people someone would notice that alien language ought to be crazy and if it doesn't have two dozen features that seem crazy you did it wrong, but it's so easy, when you've grown up with the world all around you, to underestimate how much creativity would be required to invent it; I'm sure they were doing their best, and I don't expect I could've done it well either. Well, today I easily could, but not if I'd grown up in your world.
I actually wonder what share of the obvious errors are a consequence of the difficulty of extrapolating history, versus a consequence of the difficulty of extrapolating linguistics specifically. How long as it been since your rulers banned your history, did they permit notes on the relative frequency of wars and migration and epidemics and transitions in staple crops and durations of rule or did they ban that as well?"