Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I agree - syllables are a stand-in for phonemes. For the bystander watching this exchange:
When I was working with the AVOS company (Assistive technology for the visually impaired) I became very interested in speech IO and the production of speech sounds. I discovered that the sounds of speech are an artifact of the kinds of sounds that the human speech production hardware was capable of making.
Please examine the charts on page 15 of this lecture:
http://research.cs.tamu.edu/prism/lectures/sp/l3.pdf
You can see that there is are maps of the various sounds that a human is capable of making and the sounds are “fixed points” on these maps that are distinct enough that they can be reliably produced and recognized.
I totally agree - speech sounds are not thinking. I suspect that this is a large part of the reason that AI approaches that are text/speech based have not been very successful. That said - speaking really does engage and expand the mental hardware. Humans without speech really are not what most of us think of a fully human. I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and have commented on this before:
While it sounds difficult to extract and represent the underlying symbols of the communication of thought it seems that google is mucking around with that very thing with their translate project:
Again - for the interested bystander - Want to learn more?
This is one of the first books I read on these topics, A classic top to bottom text on the entire chain of speech from speaker to listener: