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.
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zvi and
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Date: 2011-04-02 05:24 pm (UTC)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.