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>> Aside from Toaq Dzu, Guaspi, Livagian and Solresol, I can't think of too many non-artlangs that
>> employ tones
>
> Also Ithkuil, which, like Livagian, has tonic consonants as well as vowels.
I'd forgotten that Ithkuil had tones.
> I think a loglang with IALish aspirations to acquire many users should probably eschew tone,
> even if that is only because of pandering to tonophobia.
Other than Solresol, I can't think of any IALs with tones, and assume that tones could be an impediment to wide adoption.
But my own ideal is something that would combine the best features of Toaq Dzu, Minyeva, Liva, Guaspi, Ithkuil, etc with the relative compactness attributed to Heinlein's Speedtalk. It's something I play with in odd moments, but it hasn't really gotten very far - at the moment, I think it would have tones that mark syntactic structure, like Toaq Dzu, with 64 onsets and 64 vowels, giving it a working vocabulary of roughly 4096 lexemes, some portion of which would be functional - discursives, discourse markers, etc - with the majority of the lexemes constituting an open class, whose status as predicate, modifier, argument, etc is determined by tone. Perhaps I'll try to nail down specifics over the Christmas break.
> For an ideal language, I guess the testimony of Livagian (which aspires to be one...) is that the ideal
> number of tones is two. (Livagian has two phonetic tones and two phonological tones, which don't
> neatly correspond to each other.) Again for Livagian, I've considered having a section of the language
> for discourse markers and interjections and the like that has its own phonology, making use of a much
> larger range of phonetic contrasts (phonation types, more tones), in a way a bit like clicks in English
> or ingressive airstream in Swedish: I reckon that in a limited and circumscribed area of lexis, a greater
> range of phonetic contrasts could be viable. (This, remember, for a language that nobody speaks
> natively and probably never could (because native acquisition would transmogrify it, I conjecture).)
> For a language spoken only non-natively, what do you think are the limits on viable phonology?
> Assume we want to maximize robust paradigmatic contrast.
The best example I can think of would be Demiin/Damin, the ritual vocabulary of the Lardil - only about 300 words or so, using Lardil morphology, but the core phonology is famously unlike any Australian language, or any language anywhere. Damin phonology has been one of the inspirations for my own conlanging. Wikipedia's article gives a the majority of the phonemes - I'd met Ken Hale some 20+ years back at a linguistics conference when I was in grad school, and he mentioned they'd identified an additional phone, a uvular affricate /qX/, though the article on which Wikipedia based theirs had been written prior to that discovery.
Bfowol