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
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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.
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