MYSTIC MEG VERSUS PHONEY MICK

You can always tell a high‐profile field of expertise by the way it attracts alternative versions offering quantum‐infused good luck charms or the like.  In a few of the most deep‐rooted cases the hucksters even got there first and laid claim to the ‐ology.  But alas, the study of languages has never been interesting enough to give rise to anything more than vague uncodified bodies of misinformation.  Yes, there are crackpots who claim that every language in the world is descended from Turkish or whatever their own native tongue happens to be; but it's rare for those pseudosciences to outlive their inventors, because they don't offer anything more than an opportunity to be smugly ethnocentric, and people never needed much assistance with that anyway.  And then there's the related field of spurious decipherments (related by the way the Phaistos disk turns out to be written in Turkish); but those usually produce catastrophically dull nonsense as output, and they've been getting harder and harder to come up with since most of the things where there's anything to be deciphered have already been cracked.

The nearest you get to systematic linguistic mysticism is the text‐based pseudosciences like graphology and nominal numerology, where there are thriving industries in telling people their fortunes (or binning their job applications) on the basis of the way they write their names.  This imbalance in prestige between speech and writing goes back to the days when knowing how to produce a sequence of arcane glyphs that were somehow capable of conveying a meaning was much more impressive than just saying the word, but it's odd that it has persisted so strongly in an era when every child is expected to master runecraft at primary school.

However, fortune‐telling techniques like graphology can't possibly date back any further than the invention of writing, and the “pagan” traditions that the more innovative and forward‐looking soothsayers tend to favour these days are exactly the ones that aren't associated with a sacred text.  This looks to me like an opportunity for linguists to get a foot in the door at last.  Surely the truly authentic way of searching for occult significance in a name or a phrase is to ignore all that newfangled orthographic nonsense and learn to inspect the entrails of the actual utterances!

Here's my suggested divinatory methodology, which is designed to be simple enough that you can do it in your head with a little practice and robust enough to give more or less evenly distributed results for the samples I've tested it on.

Stage one: tally the phonemes, and especially the voiced and voiceless plosives or fricatives.  Except that we might want to avoid that recognisable terminology, so instead let's say “hot” for voiced, “cold” for voiceless, and “hard” for the obstruents that we're totting up here.

• Words where the hard phonemes are predominantly hot (like VowelS) are classed as “hot” words.
• Ones where the hard phonemes are predominantly cold (like ConSonanTS) are “cold” words.
• Words where the hard phonemes are equally split between hot and cold (including the no‐score draws) are “hot” if they contain four or more phonemes in total, “cold” if they're shorter.

Stage two: let's say that vowels and all the coronal consonants (with a place of articulation between dental and postalveolar) are “dry”, while the remainder (the peripheral consonants mpbfvjŋkɡhw) are “wet”.  But this time instead of tallying individual phonemes, we're looking at uninterrupted runs of one type or the other.

• Words with more runs of dry than wet phonemes are themselves “dry”; for instance reinternationalisations is a single long dry spell.
• All others are “wet”, like piggybacking – five wet consonants separated by only four dry vowels.

My motivation for talking about “hot/cold” and “dry/wet” words rather than, say, “yin/yang” or “tinny/woody” is of course that it lets us interpret our results in terms of the classical system of elements (the boring Aristotelian version that leaves out the element of surprise):

Yes, air is hot and earth is dry, you can tell Aristotle didn't live in Scotland.  But if we add one more stage, this time allowing for three different possible outcomes, we can get a grand total of twelve different categories of word, which has the distinct advantage that we can then crib all our signs and portents straight off the astrologers!

So then, Stage Three:

• Anything that begins with an actual vowel sound is “mutable”. Otherwise, the question is whether the first and last phonemes in the word are “hard” (obstruents) or “soft” (sonorants/vowels).
• Words that both begin and end with hard phonemes (like charge) are “cardinal”;
• Words with one hard end and one soft end (like lots) are “fixed”;
• Words that both begin and end soft (like me) are “mutable” again.

Putting everything together in the traditional way (because if it's traditional it doesn't need to make any sense):

Mind you, the word Scorpio isn't itself in Scorpio, it's cold and mostly dry (= earth) and goes from hard fricative to soft vowel (= fixed), which means Taurus.  You don't necessarily have to tell your clients that the answer comes out “Scorpio” anyway: you can tell them it's “hydrostatheric” or “Phonebalonicus” or something while you're recycling decorative verbiage from last week's horoscopes for Scorpio.

If you try to apply these rules you may get the feeling that I've left things a bit too vague, but no!  That's deliberate, and makes it easier to doctor the results.  If you don't like the way the omens come out, you can simply cheat.

• Instead of working in the dialect you first thought of, maybe it would be more symbolically appropriate to use one from Ballyshannon, Pittsburgh, or Woodenbong. Better yet, some sort of ad hoc compromise.  For anything as divergent as Scots you should re‐tune the rules, and I'd have thought foreign languages would need a completely different set, but then again look at the way astrologers have got away with ignoring the precession of the equinoxes.
• Phrases can either be processed on a holistic basis, i.e. smushed into one word (especially in the case of phonological units like aingonna), or analysed as strings of discrete lexemes (isn't, going, to, each identified in terms of its dictionary citation form).  You might even want to recognise the final s in cats as a mere devoiced allomorph of what is in some deeper sense a z.
• Instead of always operating on the level of phonemes (where for instance joy is only two units long), you might sometimes get more appropriate results by going straight to the phonetics (where an affricate plus diphthong makes four).
• It's easy to justify ignoring the unstressed schwa any time it's inconvenient, and depending on the dialect you might say the same about h or in some cases r or l or w or j.  Then again, maybe instead of calling h an approximant you might prefer to class it as a (cold) voiceless fricative?
• If you're handling a complete sentence word by word you can decide for yourself whether each one carries the same weight or whether you're paying special attention to the ones that are syntactically or semantically prominent.

Alternatively you can fudge the output by fudging the input.  For instance, if the question is whether a particular person's name is auspicious or doom‐laden, you're free to decide for yourself whether that name is Liz Anne Smith or Mrs Elizabeth Smith née Jones.

What good is all this?  Well, in a world where machines have suddenly become much better at spewing bullshit than human beings are, this surely means a window of opportunity for linguists.  Large‐Language‐Model so‐called‐AIs may give the superficial impression of being fluent speakers of English, but in reality the only topic they're experts in is what strings of written characters tend to occur together.  They can generate detailed and convincing explanations of why it's important to invest all your savings in NFTs while Uranus is in Cancer, because they've got thousands of years of similar blitherings to plagiarise and just as much grasp of what the signs of the zodiac really are as the people who were making a living out of this game.  But they can't expound on the phonomantic significance of a pop lyric or brandname or political slogan, because this is the only page on the whole Internet that deals with how to do that, and I've cunningly left all the details for you to work out for yourselves with the application of a bit of common sense.  I told you it wasn't laziness – it's all part of the master plan!  A bare outline of the algorithm ought to be quite enough for my human readers…