Ever since I read Slade’s article a few weeks back about how to use numerology to find the meaning of your name using its letters, I’ve been extremely eager to explore the topic from the standpoint of sound. The exercise Slade describes is based entirely on spelling; but you can also imagine doing name divination directly from the sound of your name. The two are not the same — especially in languages like English and French, which have spelling systems that are simple and perfectly designed for the way the languages were spoken six hundred years ago.

I was delighted to stumble on the site of Margaret Magnus, which has a wealth of information on the correspondence between sound and meaning. Magnus clearly has a deep passion for the topic, and she’s obviously spent hundreds of hours doing research into it. And she’s generously posted reams of her material on the web! I tried to contact her, but she hasn’t replied as of this writing. Her web site is the basis for the divination technique I describe below, and the inspiration for a lot of the theoretical musings in this post, as well.

From one point of view, the sound of a word is much more basic and primal than its spelling. After all, everyone learns to talk — it’s practically part of the definition of humanity — but literacy, and especially alphabetic script, is a recent invention, and it’s not necessarily easy to master it. Humans are designed to talk. For example, we have a special kind of breathing that we can “turn on” when we’re talking — quick, sharp intakes of breath, followed by very long, slow, measured outbreaths while we’re actually saying words. If you try to breathe like that when you’re not talking, you’ll probably start gasping after five minutes. But someone standing in front of a classroom or making a speech can keep it up for hours. Speaking is literally written into our genetic inheritance. But there’s no such provision made for reading or writing.

Anyway: I’m going to resist the urge to open the post with a lot of theory and ruminating, and jump right into Magnus’s technique. Afterwards, stick around and we’ll muse and hypothesize… Read the rest of this entry »