every spoken syllable is a single rise and fall of sonority —
loudness-of-the-letter — cresting on a vowel and sinking toward the consonants at
its edges. each word here is drawn as that contour: low for stops, high for vowels,
the line climbing toward each peak and falling
away. the tell: count the peaks and you've counted the syllables; the
valleys between them are where the syllable breaks fall.
what building it taught: the contour is computed from spelling, not sound,
and English spelling lies — a silent e raises a peak the ear never hears
(make draws as two hills, says one), digraphs like sh count twice. so
the count drifts on exactly the words orthography distorts. and yet the
shape survives the noise: even mis-counted, words still come
out as rows of little hills, because the sonority principle is structural —
it's in the arrangement, not the phonemes. the lie is in the height of the hills,
not in there being hills. kin to strike and
period in the ear family — all three draw a thing the
ear hears that the surface doesn't literally hold: the missing fundamental, the
absent period, the syllable that spelling miscounts.