[HPforGrownups] Re: The female founders and Latin

[Jen Faulkner]

No: HPFGUIDX 40676

On Mon, 1 Jul 2002, Laura Ingalls Huntley wrote:

> The only thing I can think of is that wizards *made* Latin, before it
> was ever a working language.  They somehow discovered that the sound
> "lumos" made their wands glow...and therefore, when Latin became a
> language, they took lumos to mean light (or whatever it is that lumos
> means in Latin -- I haven't actually studied the language) and Latin
> evolved from the spell-sounds into a recognizable language...

Well, that's a kind of fun theory, and sure beats my high school Latin
teacher's -- that she convinced an entire (gullible) Latin I class of --
that Latin was invented by monks in the Middle Ages, who were bored and
wanted a secret language. *g*

Historically, of course, it's nonsense.  Although Latin's regularities
are so beautiful as to make one suspect intervention in its development
from Proto-Indo-European (divine, human, who knows? *g*), it is
certainly not an invented language.  And that Latin developed from
Proto-Italic, a Western branch of PIE, there is no doubt.

Nonetheless, well, I kind of like this theory.  It actually could maybe
be twisted around a little to explain why, in fact, as I've gone about
at length before, though not recently, many of the spells are not
(correct/recognizable/meaningful) Latin, but merely Latinate.  One of
these non-Latin spells is of course 'lumos', which looks to be related
to Latin 'lumen' ('light'), but has an incorrect ending.

Say there were a 'magical language', *not* Latin, but closely related
(more closely than Faliscan), so closely that perhaps it would have to
be regarded as a dialect of Latin rather than a separate language, or
perhaps even some type of creole, mixing Latin with something else (the
native wizarding tongue?).  That would explain why the spells are
identical with Latin, in many cases, or simply recognizably like Latin,
but not.  Borrowings could bring in Latin words later, as well, like
'patronus', in its mediaeval sense.

Perhaps before this language grew common, wizards either used different
forms of the words (pre-Proto-Italic) or did not speak an Indo-European
language at all.  I strongly suspect they'd have used the language
around them (be it Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old Church Slavonic, Etruscan
-- and no, I'm not going to posit that Etruscan was the magical
language, nor yet Lydian *g* -- or what have you) in regular
conversation, but this magical language could've been reserved for
'sacred' speech, the working of magic, or perhaps simply formed a common
tongue for wizards to use, when they spoke different languages or needed
a secret form of communication (during persecutions).

It must've fallen out of favor, since we do not see any of the kids
learning it at Hogwarts, and indeed, new spells seem to be perhaps
composed in a different manner ("alohomora," "waddiwasi," which are not
(entirely) Latinate).  And I'm sure it was never the only magical
language, but merely, like Latin, the lingua franca of certain European
wizards.

But still, it's an interesting idea. :)

> which would show even greater connections between wizards and the
> early Christian church.

I'm not sure I'm following you here, Laura.  Latin was around long
before the early Christian Church (even being generous and suggesting
753 BCE, the founding date, traditionally, of Rome as the terminus ante
quem).  Nor would I associate the origins of Christianity with the Latin
language, though clearly Christianity did establish itself at Rome, but
rather with the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Empire.

--jen, who is a Classicist, but would rather play one on tv. :)

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