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

[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.