Wizarding English: was Re: [HPforGrownups] Re: If Muggles are unaware of Wizards

[Steve <bboy_mn@yahoo.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 49685

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Irene Mikhlin"
<irene_mikhlin at b...> wrote:

> Irene:
> 
> Anyway, about accents and the wizarding english in general:
> 
> Isn't it strange that such an isolated community keeps in touch 
> with developments in the language? ...edited...
> Wizards isolated themselves from muggles sometime in the Middle 
> Ages, and the most modern artifact they borrowed from them - train 
> - is early 19th century so how do they keep up with the language?
> In the muggle world there are many examples of isolated communities 
> ...edited...
> 
> Irene

bboy_mn:

Let's add some perspective to this.

How is it that the Scottish and the Irish have failed to keep up with
modern English, for that matter, from an American perspective, how is
it that the English have failed to keep up?

English in the middle ages was a completely foriegn language relative
to anything we would remotely consider English. I read the Magna
Charta in Old English, it was completely indecipherable. I could have
just as well been written in Swahili.

Compare how Harry and Ron talk relative to the way Daniel and Rupert
talk, and I think you will see that Harry and Ron speak a very basic
standard quality English. It's not colored by modern phrases, or
ethnic brogue. Harry and Ron don't describe anything and everthing
they see as being either 'cool' or 'wicked'. 

As far as wizards (re: your reference to the train) being trapped in
the 19th century, let's not forget wizard automobiles and Wizards
Wireless. I don't think wizards are 'trapped' in any age; I think they
just hold to their traditions of dress and culture. 

Remember that many wizard live among the muggles, however, I think
they, like the Weasleys, are able to stay isolate because they don't
have to leave their house to travel. That is, they don't have to
venture out into the muggle world. They either Floo or Apparate. So
while they are able to look out the window and see the muggle world
around them, they prefer to keep to themselves and stick with the old
traditional ways. 

The Weasleys have been to their local village, but I think, to them,
it is about the same as a typcial Englishman venturing out alone into
a primitive tribal village in Africa, Asia, or South America. It's an
extremely foriegn, scary, and unpredicatable place.

I remember a witch (presumably) waved to Harry on a city bus. The
witch may have resigned herself to the fate of the bus, as a matter of
practical necesstity, but I suspect she regarded that contraption
right up there with riding on the back of a water buffalo or camel. 


Besides, muggle trains, planes, and automobiles.... those things are
dangerous? I mean riding an enchanted broom is one thing, afterall,
you can trust magic, but to get inside one of those roaring clattering
tin cans filled with highly volital fuel, cramped up with a hundred
other dirty, smell, loud, ignorant muggles and attempt to fly through
the air... why it's positively absurd. 

It's not that wizards aren't part of the modern world, they just find
it to be so primitive, unpredictable, dangerous, and therefore
somewhat repulsive that they avoid it, and stick with tried and true
tradition fo wizards.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

bboy_mn