Wizarding English: was Re: Re: If Muggles are unaware of Wizards, why do they agree to send their kids to Wizarding schools

[Daniel R. Tobias]

No: HPFGUIDX 49699

"Irene Mikhlin" <irene_mikhlin at btopenworld.com> said:
> Wizards isolated themselves from muggles sometime in the Middle Ages, and
> the most modern
> artefact they borrowed from them - train - is early 19th century so how do
> they keep up
> with the language?

Actually, they also adopted indoor plumbing... note all the 
references to bathrooms at Hogwarts.  I guess they do occasionally 
regard muggle innovations as useful; bedpans and outhouses, even 
enhanced by magic, were inferior solutions.

There's clearly a good deal of cultural borrowing in both directions 
between wizards and muggles despite their separation; wizards have 
borrowed some muggle technologies and language change, while muggles 
have absorbed some wizard stuff into folklore.

> In the muggle world there are many examples of isolated communities where
> language
> was preserved as it has been at the time of the split from the cultural
> metropolis.

That's not quite accurate; language has a strong tendency to change 
and evolve in all cases, but isolated communities will evolve in 
different directions.  The language spoken in an isolated place may 
have some elements in common with the ancestral language, which may 
have been lost in the outside community, but will have other things 
that are changed from the original language, just in different ways 
from the "outside" language.  After a long enough separation, the two 
groups will speak very different languages, and neither will be 
identical to the ancestral tongue.

-- 
== Dan ==
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