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.
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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.