Hypertonal conlang

Today's SMBC:

The mouse-over title: "Constructing the 30,000-tone language for Anne was more challenging."

The AfterComic:

The phrase "with every word consisting of two identical syllables" is misleading,as the tone-marking diacritics on the strip's transcriptions indicate, since the tone markings are different across the two syllables in e.g.

Chérŷl Chе̄rȳl

So the number of possible words in this language is not 175, but rather 175*175=30,625 — which is plenty for Steve's purposes, but probably a bit too low to be realistic.

Here's a graph suggesting that the effective (phonologically distinct) number of possible English words is between 19 bits (524,288) and 20 bits (1,048,576):

(Obviously we'd get a bigger number from a larger list of "words", especially one including lexicalized phrases. For a better explanation, see the presentation that it came from, or the brief discussion here…)