[HPforGrownups] Re: Latin and the Founders WAS Female Founders

[Edblanning at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 40308

Pip quotes me:

> > 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.
> 
> Pip:
> This is extremely arguable. Most Latin-speaking nuns were of noble 
> 

Eloise:
Isn't that exactly what I said?

Pip:
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 
> 

Eloise:
I don't see what the argument is here. Exactly. Most people did not learn 
Latin, since it was the language of scholarship and of literacy.
Scholarship and literacy were largely in the hands of the Church, so I am led 
back to the original question of how a witch came to know Latin. I am 
*assuming* that at this point, as at most others, witchcraft and the Church 
weren't particularly compatible. I know alchemy (which has been practiced by 
the religious) has very ancient origins, but again, in Britain that tends to 
be associated with the Middle Ages and later, rather than the pre-conquest 
period.

> Pip:
> 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 
> 

Eloise:
I think you're pushing the point here. You're probably correct, but it's 
inference, particularly since there is no evidence that Latin and literacy 
are skills taught today in the furtherance of high level magic. 

And why bother with a *castle*, which is a defensive building? Could it have 
been for protection, more than anything else?

> Eloise:
> > 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.
> > 
> Pip:
> 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 
> 

Eloise:
Naturally. That was my instinctive interpretation. But the text says that 
they built a castle (complete with subterranean hidden chamber) and no-one 
did that in Saxon-period Britain, as far as I am aware. Except magicians, it 
seems! :-)
I'm quite happy to accept that the Fouders built a castle. It's canon. For 
the Muggle world, though, it's an anachronism.

> Pip:
> 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 
> 

Eloise:
Who is later than the period under consideration, as are motte-and bailey 
castles, wooden or not.

> 
> > 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.
> 

Pip:

> IRC, 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 
> 

Eloise:
Agreed. But it's all inference. I was replying to a thread that made the 
assumption that the female founders *did* speak Latin. I have said that Latin 
was the language of the educated at the time. 

The point I was making here was simply that the founders don't sound like a 
bunch of Anglo-Saxons, or Jutes, or Picts, or 'Celts', whatever. You have a 
valid point that it may have been an international school. But my point about 
'Gryffindor' is that it sounds like a British corruption of a French name, 
the sort of name that would occur at a later point in history. Goodness only 
knows what 'Hufflepuff' sounds like. And 'Slytherin' sounds to my ears like 
nothing but a modern play on words, though I am more than happy to be 
corrected.

> Eloise:
> > 
> > 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. 
> 

Pip:

> er 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 
> 

Eloise:
More or less what I said. JKR's wizard Latin is derived from Latin, rather 
than being a recognised form of Latin. I just happen to believe that it's 
*her* creation and that she hasn't really tried to reconstruct the liguistic 
route that the words might have taken. Just as some of her names/terms have 
obvious significance and some seem to have been chosen out of humour.

> 
> > We also have no evidence whatsoever that the students learn Latin, 
> > or any other language, come to that. 
> 

Pip:

> gain, 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 
> 

Eloise:
Precisely. I was countering the argument that Latin *is* a wizarding lingua 
franka.

> 
> <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
> 

Pip:

> h, I always think it's much more fun to try and make it work. [Very 
> 

Eloise:

That way madness lies. ;-)

I'm afraid I get to the point where I lose patience with trying to make every 
detail of someone else's imaginary world work. Like I wouldn't waste my 
energies determined to make all the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle fit if I was 
pretty sure that some of the originals were missing and and had been 
substituted by others from another puzzle.

The point I was making was simply that I don't think it is helpful to try to 
confine the founding of Hogwarts in an historical straitjacket. If we do, 
then awkward questions arise. If we assume that the wizarding and Muggle 
worlds had already started to diverge, then the building of a castle becomes 
more acceptable.

But...If JKR says that the founders built a castle, fine, within the confines 
of this piece of literature, they did. 

However a lot of people reading it will not realise that this is an 
anachronism. I'm tempted to ask whether the author did. If she did, does it 
have significance? *I* suspect not.  I suspect she just liked the idea of the 
school being set in an ancient castle, just as she simply liked the idea of 
the students all going to school by train (even though many of them logically 
will have travelled further just to get to Kings Cross than they would have 
done if they'd gone directly to Hogwarts). 

This anachronism suggests, to me at least, that we don't have to worry too 
much about making the other details of the founding fit too much, either. 
That was the one paragraph of mine that you quoted above, but didn't comment 
on. ;-)

Eloise






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