One of my goals with Sika has been to make the words as small as possible without compromising usability. Here, I've listed some systems I've considered and tried, as well as some other ideas. Many of these do not mesh well with certain design goals:

• Extremely strict phonotactics, like all words being CVV. This has the disadvantage of, well, being too strict to allow longer words.

• Specific initial phonemes/phonetic elements, which make and are found only in the beginnings of words. This is my current solution, with words beginning with unvoiced phones and the rest voiced.

• Make lengthened initial phonemes acceptable in the middle of a word. This is essentially a variant of the last.

• Set a fixed number of phonemes per word, for instance in Vötgil, where every word has exactly 3. This has similar drawbacks to the first.

• Always put stress on the first syllable. Not good if you don't want stress, or if you have a lot of monosyllabic words.

• Require breaks of some sort between words, for instance in the form of phones like /ʔ/ and /h/, or just very short pauses. This can have the drawback of making speech choppy.

• Have so few words that it's feasible to do none of this, like toki pona.

• Use a single phoneme for each word, like aUI. I haven't seen this taken to an extreme yet, but it'd be interesting to see how a larger language could work in this fashion.

Any other ideas?