Latin and the Founders WAS Female Founders

[bluesqueak]

No: HPFGUIDX 40261

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "edblanning" <Edblanning at a...> wrote:
> Rosie:
> >   Tessy wrote:
> > 
> >   "I have spent the last few days thinking about the four
> >   founders, particularly about the two women Rowena and
> >   Helga. My first question is: Is there anything
> >   stated, when Hogwarts was founded? I assumed that it was
> >   somewhere around 100 AD or something. But going by
> >   this date, I wonder how it was possible for Helga and
> >   Rowena to learn Latin, since this is the language
> >   needed for the various spells. I assume that the
> >   magical community was mixed with the non-magicals in
> >   that time, since magic was associated with the gods
> >   in pre-Christanity ages. Women had a high status in the
> >   celtic culture and most of the religious figures were
> >   females. But assuming this would lead to the fact
> >   that the celts detested the christians (save for the
> >   friars because there the two religions mixed) and would not
> >   want to learn their languages. So how did Helga and
> >   Rowena learn Latin?"
> > 
Rosie replied: 
> >  I *think* I'm correct in saying that by the time Hogwarts would 
> have been founded (assuming c.100AD) Britain had already been 
> invaded by the Romans, some time earlier; although Greek was used 
> for really important things, Latin was the language learnt and 
> taught. Only the plebs didn't know any; anyone with an education 
> would know Latin in Britain. In any case, as Pip says, I think 
> Hogwarts was founded about 1000 years later than that.
> 
> Eloise replies:
> Yes, you're correct on the latter. Both the Sorting Hat and Prof 
> Binns say that Hogwarts was founded over a thousand years ago.
> 
> Just for the record, Britain, well, southern Britain, became part 
> of the Roman Empire in AD 43. How many people were educated enough 
> to know Latin is a moot point. A date in the tenth century, or 
> perhaps rather earlier puts the founding of Hogwarts firmly into 
> the Anglo-Saxon era. Or Pictish in Scotland.
> 

> At this time, yes, the educated would know Latin (at least, after 
> the arrival of Christianity). As far as women went, I would suggest 
> that would include only the daughters of nobility, educated 
> privately (and not necessarily then) and nuns, also often of noble 
> birth. (As a matter of interest, the school my daughter is about to 
> move on to was founded in 604, but it didn't admit girls until 
> 1993!) I don't know anything about witchcraft during the period, 
> but I think it's unlikely that practitioners of native magic would 
> be Latin speakers.
 

This is extremely arguable. Most Latin-speaking nuns were of noble 
birth - but not all. And literacy, or Latin speaking, were both  
primarily seen as job-related skills in the 10th Century (and were 
seen so right up to the High Middle Ages). Most people didn't learn 
to read simply because they had no *need* to read in their work (and 
the cost of books and paper made reading a *very* expensive hobby). 

The fact that the Hogwarts founders felt it necessary to build a 
school, rather than continue what must have previously been 
an 'apprenticeship' system, suggests to me that it was becoming 
obvious that literacy and Latin were required skills for high level 
magic. Otherwise why bother with a school? All non-literacy based 
crafts were taught solely by apprenticeship well into the High Middle 
Ages.

> But I think it's a mistake to try to put Hogwarts' founding into a 
> Muggle historical context. We're told the founders built the       
> castle. 
> Well, castles didn't exist in Britain during the Saxon period (with 
> or without plumbing!)There were no large stone buildings, excepting 
> some churches. OK, there was the original Westminster Abbey, 
> sometime in the 900s (built by a Frenchman) but nothing else 
> substantial and certainly not in Scotland.
> 

No, but 'built' when applied to buildings over a thousand years old 
tends to mean more 'built the original building on this site. We 
still have some of the surviving stones in that wall over there.' 
[grin]- after all, Hogwarts probably got bigger, some of the original 
parts probably gave up the fight against woodworm and the British 
weather after a century or three, and the only reason the Chamber of 
Secrets survived was likely to be the sheer number of spells 
protecting it. 

Certainly most of our Muggle 'Ancient Castles' only have some of the 
original bits left, sometimes started as wooden Motte-and-Bailey 
style constructions, and now often have modern plumbing as well. But 
you'd still describe them as having been 'built' by, say, William the 
Conqueror.:-)

> The names of the founders don't ring true for the period, either. 
> Gryffindor seems to be of French origin, more the sort of thing 
> you'd get after the Norman Conquest.

IIRC, Hogwarts is the oldest school of magic in Europe, and may have 
originally had students from all of Western Europe - the founders are 
described as the greatest witches and wizards of the age, not the 
greatest British/Irish witches and wizards. Salazar is of Portugese 
origin, I think? And Britain as a whole was pretty much off the 
beaten track in the 10th Century - a good place to hide a school. 

Another reason for the original 'teaching' language to have been 
Latin would be that the original students could not have spoken 
English (it didn't exist). I'm not an expert on which languages were 
around then, but there was not just one native language in 10th 
Century Britain [Even today English is *not* the native language of 
the whole of the British Isles - though Welsh and Gaelic speakers do 
generally have English as their second language]. Languages included 
Anglo-Saxon, Old Danish (Northern England), Gaelic and the Welsh 
variant of Gaelic (now Welsh). Whether Hogwarts originally covered 
all Western Europe or not, they would still have had to pick one 
language to teach in - and Latin would have been the logical choice. 

> 
> So it looks to me like we either just have accept what JKR says and 
> not question it too closely, or assume that already there was a  
> rift between magical and non-magical folks, which means that we 
> don't have to worry too much about how Helga and Rowena learned    
> their Latin.
> 
> 
> On a related note, it has been suggested that Latin is used for 
> spells as it is a sort of lingua franka, allowing communication 
> between wizards of different nationalities. 
> 
> My Latin is somewhat rusty, but I would say that many of JKR's 
> spells aren't so much Latin, as Latin-derived. She uses some very 
> odd forms with no consistency. To me, she's just playing with words 
> in the same way she often does with names. 

Her Latin doesn't follow any classical rules, no, but that is 
consistent with 'Wizard Latin' taking a different, non-muggle route - 
probably moving to being solely used for spell identification at some 
unknown point. Medieval Latin has slightly different rules to 
Classical Latin, and the Latin still used by biologists to identify 
plants and animals has some exceedingly weird constructions as well.
 
> We also have no evidence whatsoever that the students learn Latin, 
> or any other language, come to that. 

Again, most biologists simply learn the Latin terminology by rote 
these days, and wouldn't bother with the Latin language as such 
(though I believe a Latin 'O' level (O.W.L. equivalent) used to be 
compulsory for some biological degree courses as few as 30 years 
ago). So this may be what happens in modern Hogwarts - students just 
learn the spell terminology.

<Snip>
> 
> No, I think I'll just choose to live happily with the fact that the 
> whole lot just doesn't work when you look too closely.
> 
> Eloise

Oh, I always think it's much more fun to try and make it work. [Very 
big grin].

Pip