title_body: Strategies for dealing with limited/simple phonologies
upvoted_answer: One major problem is that a small phoneme inventory leads to longer words, as you have fewer short ones available. This kind of relates to the point you already mention, namely homophones: here you simply re-use a word form for multiple meanings.
  Words would also sound more alike, even if different. This is one of the main problems I have with Hawai'ian (of course the vocab is mostly unrelated to the Western European languages I know), that words are hard to recognise for a learner, and then it's even harder if individual phonemes are different and completely change the meaning of the word.
  This is fine for toki pona, which only has a small inventory of words anyway, but any more extensive language would quickly run into longer words or phrases.