Bad Latin and wizarding spells

[nancylebov]

I was wondering why the spells are in bad Latin-- the boring explanations are that Rowling either didn't know Latin and/or manipulated the Latin to get results that sounded better for English speakers who don't know Latin.

However, are there any in-universe explanations? I tentatively suggest that muggle Latin was manipulated by wizards to eliminate magical effectiveness.

This sounds good on the first bounce (I've tried it on a few people), but it leaves important questions open. Is wizard Latin much older than muggle Latin? Do we have an unrecorded history of muggles and wizards in close enough contact for language to be transferred?

Comments

[andrewducker]

My guess would be that the words themselves are less important than the feelings that they produce in the person casting the spell. They're psychological triggers. For them to be effective they have to sound meaningful, but with emotional weight behind them. Cod Latin mixes meaning and import together with just the right mix to provide optimum psychological conditions for spell production.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Medieval English Latin as used by the church fathers was pretty much as dreadful as Rowling's Latin, so it seemed perfectly OK to me.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

...because they were (for the most part; Alcuin is an exception) mentally translating from English to Latin rather than thinking in Latin.

[caper-est.livejournal.com]

I'd go with that, and the persistence of Latin in however locally hairy a form as the Western language of scholarship over that time. The time and place Hogwarts was founded seems about right for that to explain both the Latin and the hairiness thereof in its tradition.

This suggests that Latin doesn't have any innate magical properties in the Potterverse, any more than it has innately holy or rational properties in our world. However, most new spells are probably modified from pre-existing art. We further know that the results of a mistake in a spell are unpredictable, and often wildly over the top. So once something works, there's probably massive reluctance to rework it, and I expect the whole core of British magic is still a great mass of horrible dog-Latin, with each new layer wrapped around it more frayed and randomly adapted for effect than the last.

A more exotic possibility is that the process of converting will into magic actually requires the translation of one's intent into some barbarous jargon which has a clear meaning (so it can set out symbols), but in which one can't get to think straightforwardly and fluently (so that casting and cognition remain clearly differentiated modes). So Latin wouldn't have worked at all in Rome*, and would work badly for a good Latin scholar now - but Latinate hash would work just fine for a modern Westerner.

* Or possibly, and like English spells in England now, would have failed by working catastrophically well - as in the fireball that casts itself unasked inside your cerebral cortex.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

since wizards and muggles are continuously intermarrying I thinm the cultural distance between them is just about as big as it could be.

You're really asking "how does magic work?" and Rowling doesn't give us the tools to answer. It's credible that Durmstrang has Latinate magic, but they're right on the edge of that world, I think (and it's never spelled out where their school is - "our friends from the north"). So is there no semitic or Turkic language magic, no Chinese wizards, or is it just that HP doesn't hear about them?

I like your "dog Latin is the true magical language" thesis. Maybe all Classical Latin surviving text has been magically altered, according to some wizard-written grammar formula, to conceal its true origins. Maybe before the fall of Rome wizards and muggles lived together polytheistically and we can blame Visigoths and intolerant, exclusivist Christianity for the later separation. That's when Hogwarts had to be formed, when you could no longer learn charms at any corner temple, and Simon Magus is an encoded account of the great segregation.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

It's credible that Durmstrang has Latinate magic, but they're right on the edge of that world, I think (and it's never spelled out where their school is - "our friends from the north").

It is located in the northernmost regions of either Sweden or Norway, although the latter is most likely. (Harry Potter Wikia, citing a site that cites JKR at a public benefit reading.)

But it's notable that the Durmstrang crest has the name in Cyrillic characters as well as Roman: "DURMSTRANG" on the front ribbon, "ДУ(РМС)ТРАНГ" on the back one. Maybe the movie creators thought, as I did, that it was in Bulgaria (България). Or maybe (preferably) it has Slavic history as well as Nordic, which makes the prominence of Igor Karkaroff and Viktor Krum more reasonable.


Maybe all Classical Latin surviving text has been magically altered, according to some wizard-written grammar formula, to conceal its true origins.

Sorry, can't accept that. Having spent much of the past 40 or 50 years in fairly close company with the history of the Indo-European language family, I can say with some assurance that such a manipulation would require MASSIVE corresponding manipulation of hundreds of related languages past and present, including all the modern Romance languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sicilian, Occitan, Franco-Provençal, Catalan, and dozens more. I think the other European wizards, including those at Durmstrang and Beauxbâtons, would have had something to say about that.


Dr. Whom: Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

the Slavic/Nordic axis could make sense as a bit of wizard alternate history: Durmstrang just didn't care about Gustav's independence. There's plenty of historical precedent there for friendly relations.

The northern reference decided me on not-Bulgaria. I figured they were Baltic something, or just WW1 stereotype Russians "with the snow still on their boots."

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Durmstrang struck me as obviously German; it's clearly a spoonerized version of Sturm und Drang, the German pre-romantic literary movement.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Yes. But then their headmaster is Karkarov, which, given the highly nationalized tenor of the rest of the work, seems like an odd man out. In terms of the applicability of wizard history to muggle history (Hitler parallels etc) Durmstrang as training ground for dark wizards nicely conflates Nazism and Communism into one foreign threat. Grindelwald alas is in Switzerland, so that doesn't help much for producing a Germany thesis. I note, though, that Voldemort would be a Low German/French mashup meaning "full of death." The only perspective from which all these various European names would be equally threatening is a little Englander, anti-continental, Eurosceptical one, which I find entirely plausible for Rowling to harbour.

...in which case it really doesn't matter where Durmstrang is; it's on the dark Continent.
Re being charmed by bad Latin, I like it because it's a conundrum, not because of puns or wordplay. I Vaguely remember an idea from Malleus Maleficarum or The Cheese and the Worms or somewhere similar that all demon-inspired things must necessarily be flawed or nonsensical, and that's why magicians deal so much in nonsense words and babble. Magic in bad or hybridized Latin is highly traditional.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Harry Dresden explains in one of his books that he uses Latin because he is bad at it, and that forces a separation between intention and result (IIRC) which gives him time to actually control the magic.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Flickum bickus.

Yes, that is to my memory Dresden's explanation. That, and the White Council uses Latin as lingua franca.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I would suggest the same explanation that Tolkien used for hobbit names, and that Vernor Vinge used for the names in A Deepness in the Sky: Those aren't the actual spells that are used in the Potterverse. Rather, they're dog Latin that Rowling came up with to represent them to an audience of kids who don't actually know enough Latin to make anything of the authentic Latin spells. That is, they're a concession to the audience. The actual spells are longer and more complex and in correct classical Latin.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

or Enochian or Hebrew or Arabic or Ugaritic or Atlantean. I'm more charmed by the idea they're really in bad Latin, though.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

What, like Fabricati diem, pvnc? That works for me as humorous writing in a world that's not meant to be taken completely seriously. In some measure, of course, the wizarding world isn't meant to be taken completely seriously, at least not by adults.

[starmalachite.livejournal.com]

I tentatively suggest that muggle Latin was manipulated by wizards to eliminate magical effectiveness.

My guess would be that the words themselves are less important than the feelings that they produce in the person casting the spell. They're psychological triggers.

I came to essentially the same conclusions myself, FWIW.


We further know that the results of a mistake in a spell are unpredictable, and often wildly over the top. So once something works, there's probably massive reluctance to rework it, and I expect the whole core of British magic is still a great mass of horrible dog-Latin, with each new layer wrapped around it more frayed and randomly adapted for effect than the last.

Sounds exactly like every rant I've ever launched about the ^&#)&^! coding of MS Word.

Edited for HTML fail.

Geraldo Artisano y Las Magicas Mysteriosas

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

I agree that bad Latin was used in the Potterverse becuase this was the the author's closest personal reference source. If she'd had a pre-med background I'm sure the Nurse would have worked all her healing magic in Greek, as that's the basis for much medical terminology.

This said, I would have been far more interested in what the Sturmdrang School taught their boys, as Eastern European and/or Eurasian words would have probably been a lot more appropriate, given their implied heritage and origins. I'm also personally miffed that Miskatonic U., or an equivalent North American variation wasn't even mentioned, and that no North American transfer students made it across the pond. This would probably be a unique opportunity for some aspiring fantasy author who wanted to put in the work to create a series, either from their own mythos set or in a shared-universe agreement. (Not me; I have my planet's history upon which to expurgate.)

Imagine the tons of Inuit/Amerind spells that must have persisted way before the Europeans wiped them out. I could easily envision an adobe campus off some obscure highway, and it would be full of Native Americans trying to get Federal education funding to retain their magic, but one (literal) fair-haired kid would walk in and change up the whole magical structure by invoking Wonkin Tonka (or somesuch) to fight a magical cold war. People like blondes, so the main character would probably have to be. It would most likely be a western, Mexican or South American locale due to the extreme interest in Mayan prophecy these few years. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if the author was Latino. Who's the last Latino fantasy writer you've heard of lately?

Re: Geraldo Artisano y Las Magicas Mysteriosas

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

If you can track down Benedek Láng's Unlocked Books, it has a lot of interesting discussion of what sort of magical "exceptive arts" real medieval students were studying back around the thirteenth century in Central Europe.

I personally kind of like the idea of a Japanese high school of magic, one where several of the instructors are officially registered as "national treasures," and the whole thing is supervised by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology ("MEXT").

Re: Geraldo Artisano y Las Magicas Mysteriosas

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

Great idea! I'd immediately see them putting out their own brand of Manga that contain real spells. Some folks would get "special editions." You should run with it!

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

I have always supposed that the Wizarding Tongue is older than Latin, and that Latin has its power because it echoes Wizardry. Clearly it is an Italic tongue, with different vowel shifts; the Indo-European vocalic M became -um, not -em. (hence Expecto patronum, not patronem.)

I would believe, although I know no evidence, that Wizards used to speak it among themselves, and they have lost it as a daily speech in England because of being surrounded by English-speakers, as Irish and Yiddish are being lost.

[(Anonymous)]

One more potential in-story explanation occurs to me. Well, two really:

a) magic was introduced to our world from a close alternate universe. The "bad" latin is merely slightly alien in origin, but it still works to create magical effects. So far nobody's managed to develop "native" our universe magic words.
b) the demons that are the true origin of all magical effects can only work with "corrupted" materials. It has to be bad latin because good latin would approach too closely to perfection for them to be able to use.