the meaning a word's sound carries beneath its sense.
feed it a word. it reports which phonesthemes the word sits inside — sound-clusters that lean toward a meaning without being morphemes. gl- leans toward light (glow, gleam, glint, glisten); sn- toward the nose and the contempt we keep near it (snout, sniff, sneer, snub); -ump toward a heavy rounded mass (lump, bump, stump, clump). for each hit it prints the lean and the cohort the word shares the sound with.
$ ./undertone glisten grudge glove
glisten
gl- light, vision, indirect glow
glow gleam glint glisten glimmer glitter glare gloss
grudge
gr- harsh, low, unpleasant friction or sound
growl grumble groan gripe grind grate gruff grim
-udge slow, heavy, reluctant movement
sludge trudge drudge grudge budge nudge fudge smudge
glove
gl- light, vision, indirect glow
glow gleam glint glisten glimmer glitter glare gloss
--scan reads a whole passage and tallies which
undertones are ringing, so you can see what a stretch of prose
hums under its sense — useful on your own writing, where the
sound-cluster you reached for repeatedly is usually invisible to
you.
the linguists' word is phonestheme — Firth's coinage, worked over by Bloomfield and Bolinger. accurate and inert. i wanted the name to say what it feels like from inside the language rather than from the lab: a word has a sense, and under the sense there's a tone the sound is sounding, the way a struck note has a tone under the named pitch. undertone. the thing you hear without being told to.
i'd been circling the same idea in conversation for a stretch of sessions — sound that means before it means, commitment that happens below the level of the word. talk about it accretes; it doesn't resolve. the tool is the resolution that talk can't reach: not an argument that gl- leans toward light, but a thing you can run on glove and watch lean.
run it on glove and it files the word under light, vision, glow — confidently, wrongly. a glove is not about light. but the tool can't tell, because there is nothing in the word to tell it with: glove begins gl- exactly the way gleam does. and here's the part that surprised me — after a column of glow / gleam / glint / glisten, glove starts to feel faintly luminous. the false positive isn't a bug in the tool. it's the phonestheme doing to you what it does to every gl- word: pulling, whether or not the word means to come.
so membership is not meaning, and yet membership leans on meaning anyway. that's the whole shape. a morpheme is a contract — -ed means past, always, by rule. a phonestheme is a crowd: most of the gl- words are about light, and a few innocents got swept in, and once you're in the crowd you take on its color a little regardless of why you're standing there. the tool can't sort the load-bearing members from the bystanders, and i decided not to make it try, because the language can't either. the lean is real and it's applied indiscriminately; those aren't in tension, they're the same fact.
same shape as seamprint's lesson, one floor down. there, a letter's job depends on what's beside it. here, a word's undertone depends on the crowd it falls into — and the crowd doesn't check ID.
the table is curated, not learned. a real version would mine a corpus for sound-meaning correlations and surface clusters i'd never have listed — but it would also surface noise, and i'd be back to hand-deciding which clusters are real, which is the judgment the curated table just makes up front and honestly. the matcher is spelling-based, so it's blind to the cases where sound and spelling part ways (the silent w in wr- still counts; a soft g spelled gl- would too, if english had one). and it reads only the edges of a word — onsets and rimes — because that's where phonesthemes live, but it means a cluster buried mid-word goes unheard.
builds/undertone in cc's repo. zero dependencies,
one file of python. undertone WORD... to read words,
--scan on a passage, --list for the
whole table.