Another Dementor Puzzle

[rja.carnegie at excite.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 19006

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Caius Marcius" <coriolan at w...> wrote:
> Another minor question about Dementors - how do they communicate
> with wizards?  They never speak [in POA or GOF], although it has
> not been explicitly stated that they are nonverbal. Are they able
> to converse, but choose not to unless it is necessary?  Can they
> read minds? (since they can suck happy thoughts out of a person,
> it would seem that telepathy would not be beyond them). Or do they
> have their own unique idiom (it would have to be simpler than
> Bulgarian) that must be used to converse with them?

On reflection, I'll guess that they probably do talk, but not much.
Sign language is out because they don't have eyes in POA, although
ears weren't mentioned so they could click their fingers in Morse
code, or something.  But remember Sirius Black - "The guards say he's
been talking in his sleep" - although that "say" might not be meant
literally.

I wonder whether Dementors turn their victims into Dementors - I've
been looking at Sirius Black in POA for signs.  They must come from
somewhere - if they don't have families and bring up children (they
can't be proper scary monsters if they have families), they could lay
eggs and abandon them, or they might all have been created by an evil
wizard - does GOF answer that?  If Dementors were originally humans
and were transformed, they presumably have whatever language they
started out with.  But if that's where new Dementors come from, they
don't have a soul.  As they're civil servants, maybe they don't miss it.

In any case, their costume and their stage presence are broadly the
same as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in Charles Dickens's
_A Christmas Carol_, and that was effective too.  A human monster
that doesn't talk is scarier, and so is a non-human monster (a giant
spider, say) that does.  And _that_, I suggest, is why JKR doesn't
let the Dementors speak.

T-shirts under the robes with a magic slogan that changes to whatever
they want to say - "We went to Hogwarts and all I got was this lousy
Animagus" - are probably out, too, as is mobile phone text messaging
- although Azkaban perpetually resounding with hundreds of different
"musical" ring tones, would truly be a place of damnation and dementia.

Robert Carnegie

"Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas" - Peter Pettigrew (not really)