Thanks for the response! I think what threw me off the most is that you are working with an incorrect definition of phoneme. But In response to your answer, I wanted to warn you that the number of phonemes in a language has no bearing on the concepts you’re able to express; there are languages with only 3 consonants that are capable of expressing complex ideas just like any other lang. I would also be wary of conflating a dearth of phonologically permissible syllables with a “miniscule lexicon.”

I don’t actually think I had a consistent definition of ‘phoneme’ in my head when I wrote that; I’m not a linguist, I just hang out with some.  Eheh…

Anyway.  Obviously you could produce a wider variety of words with a small number of sounds by just having longer words… but as far as I can tell, Pokémon don’t actually do that; they seem to be pretty concise, by and large.  Or is that not what you mean?

Also – I know of languages with as few as ten consonants (Maori, the language spoken by the native people of New Zealand, where I come from, has ten – h, k, m, n, p, r, t, w, wh, and ng), and I could easily see going lower than that, but three?  Really?  Could you give an example?