Swedish Cockatrice (was Dumbledore's age..and a lot of other things)

[Fred Uloth]

No: HPFGUIDX 79151

At 07:29 PM 8/27/2003 +0000, evangelina839 wrote:
>OK - now that I know what the books *originally* said, it feels safe to 
>add this. In the
>Swedish translation, the word order was a bit different, pretty much 
>saying that it was
>the three *champions* that were injured, and not the judges. But that 
>could be a
>mistake on the translator's part; in fact, it also says that the champions 
>were
>supposed to catch a basilisk. (I have no way of checking what a cockatrice 
>could be in
>Swedish, but if I'm not totally crazy the basilisk is a basilisk in both 
>languages, right?)
>Thanks for the quote, Maris.

I found this interesting, so I actually looked up the words
Cockatrice (Latin in origin): a legendary serpent that is hatched by a 
reptile from a cock's egg and that has a deadly glance 
<http://webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=cockatrice>
Basilisk (Greek in origin): a legendary reptile with fatal breath and 
glance <http://webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=basilisk>

I found many references to them being the same thing. I'm just wondering 
why DD wasn't aware that it was a basilisk running around Hogwarts in CoS. 
I had always assumed that it was a very ancient animal that hadn't been 
seen for centuries. It also seems odd to me that a basilisk would have been 
one of the tri-wizard tasks.