Huge changes this morning

It's time to take the plunge. Ever since September 13th, 1999 my phonology has been completely unchanged, and the whole time I've been a bit uncomfortable with /c/: whether it's pronounced [S], [tS], [ts], [dZ], or whatever, its presence really isn't appropriate in the phonology of an IAL. I've held onto it because I didn't want to affect my math, and I couldn't think of anything better to replace it with: [f], for instance, might be a possibility, but it's so easy to confuse with [s] especially on the phone, and lots of languages (e.g. Finnish, Japanese) don't really have it. I toyed around with [j] and [w] for a while, but I wasn't ever sure I liked those even with massive distribution restrictions -- and they didn't buy me back my particles, which is one of the big issues.

Because with my current 10 consonants and 5 vowels, I have 50 CVs (particles) and 2500 CVCVs (roots). If I drop this down to 9 consonants, that leaves me only 45 CVs and 2025 CVCVs.

I was realizing this morning, though, that only one of my particles currently uses /c/ (co "all") and I could be pretty okay with changing this to po. I'm sad to lose cumo "squash" and colo "run," but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if they were sumo and polo instead. In short, since this is clearly the right thing to do if I want to hold onto my self-righteousness about the viability of Koa as an IAL, /c/ needs to go. So god speed your way, /c/, jedź z bogiem. It's been an honor working with you these nine years.

The second big change is not quite so traumatic, but it's sort of a big deal because things have been the way they are since about 2001 and I'm pretty used to it. So: I recognized last year that hi wasn't really working for me as the 3rd person pronoun, for reasons of euphony in sentences like the following:

Ei se si sano hi ko se loha hi?
Q 2SG=PERF=say 3SG COMP=2SG=love 3SG
"Did you tell her that you love her?"

Sano hi is marginally acceptable to me, but loha hi is just too hard to say -- the problem is that hi is phonetically extremely weak. I had talked about replacing hi with ti, and ti with to, but the latter in particular I really wasn't prepared to do. So here's the solution: the 3rd-person singular pronoun is now li. This gives us Ei se sano li ko se loha li? for the above sentence, a huge improvement.

I swear Esperanto had nothing to do with this one.

...and now to change my dictionaries and welcome this (hopefully) bright new day in the world of Koa. Next question: should I reconsider [j] and [w] to swell my root numbers a bit? It would be typologically consistent. Back after these important messages.