No, that’s exactly what I was getting at, and I totally agree that we don’t see Pokemon producing longer words – I was just thrown off when you said they don’t have “enough phonemes” to express everything (and also by the fact that it’s impossible to talk about the number of phonemes a Pokemon has outside the context of a specific language). Unfortunately I’m having trouble remembering names of languages with three consonants, but I can tell you that if they only have three, they have /p t k/ :P

I have spoken to my friends who actually know things about linguistics, unlike me, and they seem to think that there actually is an argument for using ‘phoneme’ in the way I did, on the grounds that all languages have different boundaries for what is and is not a separate phoneme, and in Squirtle’s spoken ‘language,’ if it can be called that, ‘squir’ and ‘tle’ are the smallest possible sounds available (/s/, for instance, doesn’t count as a phoneme for Squirtle because he can’t actually use it except in a specific combination of sounds).  But apparently I am on shaky ground there, so I will shut up now.

These kind people seem to think the record low for number of consonants is six, for an obscure Papuan language called Rotokas, and my linguistics major friend is highly sceptical of anything lower (also worth noting is that they have five vowel sounds, which is a lot more than most Pokémon have to work with).