Duffers

[Geoff]

No: HPFGUIDX 188558



--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Ffred Clegg <ffred_clegg at ...> wrote:

Ffred: 
> Look at a year's intake to Hogwarts.
> 
> On one side are the wizard-born children, they probably already know each other, are smartly dressed and discussing life in general in Latin, the lingua franca of the educated.
> 
> On the other side are the muggle-borns, barefoot, smelly, illiterate peasants who speak mutually unintelligible dialects of Anglo-Saxon, Middle Welsh, Cornish, Cumbrian, Gaelic, Pictish. They are terrified (because the priest has told them that witches and wizards will eat them, sacrifice them to Satan, or whatever, just before someone came along and snatched them off on a broomstick), uncomprehending, don't even know the rules for participating in polite society.

Geoff:
But, with respect, being "smartly dressed and discussing life in 
general in Latin, the lingua franca of the educated" was not the 
sole preserve of the wizarding world any more than in the 21st 
century,

To take just two examples: at that time, the Normans were 
considered to be cultured and the Anglo-Saxon nobility were, 
in terms of their time, educated, able to write poetry and literary 
works and the upper classes of both these enjoyed good standards 
of living and spoke Latin.

I imagine there were wizarding families who lived in these cultures 
alongside Muggle neighbours.

Just because flush toilets had not yet been invented doesn't make them 
gormless.
:-)