What your name says in numerology: expression, soul urge and personality numbers, and the trouble with Vietnamese tone marks

Two sisters called Nguyễn Thu Hà and Nguyễn Thu Hạ, run through numerology, come out with exactly the same set: expression 9, soul urge 3, personality 6. To a Vietnamese ear the names are nothing alike, one a river and one summer. To the conversion table they are one name.

That detail says a lot about the three numbers drawn from a name: where they come from, what they measure, and why they deserve a lighter touch than the life path.

Three numbers, three questions

• Expression, from every letter of the full name: what you tend to build over a life.
• Soul urge, from the vowels alone: what you actually want, including what you do not say.
• Personality, from the consonants alone: the impression people form before they know you.

Splitting vowels from consonants sounds arbitrary, and to a degree it is. The traditional reasoning is that vowels come from inside, unstopped by tongue or lips, so they stand for the inner self. Consonants are where sound meets resistance.

An alphabet from 1533

The idea that each letter carries a number is far older than numerology. In Hebrew and ancient Greek, letters were used to write numbers, so every word naturally had a total. The Jewish practice of reading those totals is called gematria.

In 1533 the German scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa printed the full De occulta philosophia, an encyclopedia of Renaissance occult learning. It includes tables matching letters to numbers, and secret alphabets such as the Theban script below. Modern numerology borrows the spirit of those pages, but its actual table is much newer: A is 1, B is 2, up to I as 9, then J back to 1, and so on through all 26 letters.

Two tables, two answers

The A-is-1-to-I-is-9 table is usually called Pythagorean. There is another in common use, called Chaldean, which uses only 1 to 8 and groups letters by sound rather than alphabetical order. The two give different results for the same name.

Take Nguyễn Thu Hà. On the Pythagorean table the expression number is 9. On the Chaldean table, summing the whole name, it is 1. If two websites give you two different numbers for one name, usually neither has made a mistake; they are using different tables.

The trouble with Vietnamese tone marks

Both tables hold only unaccented Latin letters, so Vietnamese names lose their diacritics first: Đ becomes D, Ơ becomes O, Ư becomes U, and all six tones vanish. Hà, Hạ and Hả all become HA. That is a convention, not a calculation, and it means the system was never designed for Vietnamese.

This site says so rather than hiding it, because it is the kind of detail that decides how far to trust a result. Vietnamese uses tone to separate meanings, and a system that discards that at step one should not be read as a precise measurement.

Before changing a name for a number

In India, respelling names for numerology is common enough to be a staple of entertainment news. The television producer Ekta Kapoor is known for a long run of series whose titles begin with K, often reported as a belief in that letter. The actor Ajay Devgan dropped an a to become Devgn, a change the Indian press usually puts down to numerology.

In Vietnam, too, people ask whether to add or drop a middle name for a "better number". Before doing so, remember the three points above: the result depends on which table you use, a Vietnamese name has already lost its tones before counting, and the same person may go by a birth name, an everyday name or an English name, each with its own numbers. A number that shifts that easily is unlikely to be what decides a destiny.

When the three disagree

The interesting part of these numbers is where they diverge. The name Lê Thị Mai Anh, for instance, gives a soul urge of 7 and a personality of 3. Read traditionally, 3 is cheerful and easy to talk to, while 7 needs a lot of time alone to think. It is a picture of someone everyone finds lively at a party, who goes home and just wants the phone off.

You do not have to believe the arithmetic to find the question worth asking. How do other people see you, and how far is that from what you actually want? The numerology tool on Thấu Mình works out all three from your name and sets them side by side, so you can see that gap for yourself.