Clong

This was my attempt to make a pretty good world IAL

Design Goals:

isolating (few to 0 affixes)
any specification of meaning should be optional
the syntax should match the average of the most commonly spoken languages weighted by how many speakers they have
the phonemes should be able to be destinguished and pronounced in all their phonotactic environments by monolingual speakers of the first n most commonly spoken languages
words should be borrowed from languages in proportion to the number of speakers they have
words to express common grammatical meanings such as case, tense, boundedness, plurality, and person should be given recognisably distinct but metrically minimal forms
a speaker should be able to make any expression of meaning almost entirely unambiguous if desired
there should be a small amount of words (excluding words for clades of organisms and languages, proper nouns (e.g. place names, people's names, cultures), and numbers which should have defined practices for derivation)
the metric length of a word should loosely correlate with how specific its meaning is and how rarely it is likely to be used
words should be borrowed strictly from single languages changing their (acoustic, not articulatory) pronunciation as little as possible, but effort should be made to select forms within languages that have broad recognisability
the language should have ways to vary the structure of a sentence to make it either easier to construct as a speaker or easier to parse as a listener
the language should be difficult to structurally reanalyse so that it will stay stable in its ideal form even with a living community of speakers

Phonology:

Consonants:

Manners	Labial	Coronal	Palatal	Velar
Aspirated Stop	p [pʰ]	t [tʰ]	c [tʃʰ]	k [kʰ]
Voiced Stop	b	d	j [dʒ]	g
Fricative	f	s	sy [ʃ]	h [x]
Nasal	m	n		hn [ŋ]
Approximant		l	y [j]	w

symbols on the left of each cell are orthography, symbols on the right are IPA values

English equivalents:

All letters except the palatal series and hn are intuitively pronounced as a literate english speaker would expect.

hn is pronounced like the ng in sing, the reason ng is not used to write this sound is because a word like anga [an.ga] could be misinterpreted as [aŋ.a] which may lead to confusion. I do concede that the spelling hn may also lead to initial confusion in learning the pronunciation of it, but I believe it would be less.
y is pronounced like the y in yes (and never represents a syllabic vowel).
sy is pronounced like the sh in she.
j is pronounced like the j in jade or the g in age (and not like the j in fjord or déjà vu).
c is pronounced like the c in cello or the ch in chair (and not like the c in can or dance).

Vowels:

	front	back
high	i	u
mid	e	o
low	a

Stress is not distinctive, but for consistency, stress is placed on the first syllable of each word. this helps distinguish words in speech. Stressed syllables have a higher pitch (and may be pronounced for a longer period of time). If you are a native english speaker, you will likely find yourself lightly stressing every other syllable from the start of the word, this is ideal. So, a word like ‘witosa’ would ideally be pronounced with a high pitch on the ‘i’, a low pitch on the ‘o’ and a middle pitch on the ‘a’.

Phonotactics:

the structure of a syllable is limited by these constraints:

A syllable can only end with an approximant or a nasal.
A syllable can start with any consonant apart from hn.
An approximant may be allowed immediately after the initial consonant of a syllable only if that consonant is not also an approximant.
Palatal and alveolar consonants except n are not allowed before y.
Nasals, alveolar and palatal stops, and h are not allowed before l.
High vowels cannot occur before w or y.
The sequences ti, di, syi, wu, yi and ew are also not allowed.

a word can be formed up of almost any sequence of syllables, with the following constraints:

non-initial syllables must begin with a consonant
a syllable that ends with an approximant may not be followed by a syllable that begins with one
?? a syllable that ends with a nasal may not be followed by a syllable that begins with one

Here's a handy table to see which phonemes can appear before which approximants in a syllable: