Re: Unilang: the Phonology

Considering that languages very frequently have at least two sibilant
phonemes, and that those who don't are likely to have neighbouring languages
that do (example: Icelandic only has /s/, but it's speakers are well
familiar with English /s/ ~ /S/), I've decided to have a two-way sibilant
distinction in Unilang. This would not be an appreciably heavy baggage to
the ease of learning, and would be quite useful in phonetic rendering,
especially in borrowing from various major languages that spring to mind:
Chinese, English, Russian, and others.

This requires me to define, again, the domains of the two sibilants in
opposition: /s/ is characteristically apical, and either dental or alveolar;
/S/ is characteristically laminal, and articulated as a post-alveolar of any
kind (retroflex, palato-alveolar, alveolo-palatal, etc etc).

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I should note, for reference to my phonetic literature, that I refer
primarily to Peter Ladefoged's & Ian Maddieson's "The Sounds of the World's
Languages"; would most of you phoneticians here vouch for that book?

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Another feature that I'm keen on adding is nasal + stop onsets (=
prenasalized stops, approximately). That's somewhat more debatable, of
course, so I haven't entirely decided. This is technically phonotactics, but
that whole thread might as well have belonged to this one, phonotactics
properly being a subset of phonology.

My reasoning would be primarily that they seem quite common; anybody know
the statistics? Also that I don't find them inherently hard to pronounce,
even though they're not common in "our" languages ("us" being the
IE-speaking Westerners).

So, question: how easy or hard do list members find it to pronounce
something like [mbi], [ndi], or [Ngo]? Is that necessarily harder for the
average human than [bli] or [dri]?

Óskar