[HPforGrownups] Re: Magical Latin

[No Limberger]

No: HPFGUIDX 186107

> Carol responds:
> It could go back even farther to the days of the Roman Empire, when Latin was the lingua franca for the western half of the empire (as Koine Greek was for the eastern half). The various Latin tribes and Romanized Celts except for those in Britain) all eventually ended up speaking some form of Latin (which later evolved into the Romance languages). Meanwhile, as you say, Church Latin was kept alive and
taught to the educated few in western Europe during the Dark Ages and was still taught in the schools and colleges of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Before the Statute of Secrecy, it was probably taught at Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, and possibly Durmstrang (depending whether it's east or west of the dividing line between Roman and Greek Orthodox Christianity. We have magical monks and friars at Hogwarts who may well have attended Hogwarts and joined Mugglle monasteries, no questions asked (either that or the Wizards had their own monasteries).
> Naturally, most of the spells from that era (approximately the 382 BC of the Ollivander family's wandmaking beginnings to AD 1692), at least those created west of what became the Byzantine Empire, would be in Latin because they'd be created by educated Wizards--or, at least, the spells taught at Hogwarts and Beauxbatons would be. Meanwhile, other(probably equivalent) spells would be created in
Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, Gaelic, Chinese, and many other languages. As the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic peoples became Christianized, they would begin casting most of their spells in Latin (or Greek, in the case of some Slavic peoples) as well.

No.Limberger responds:

I agree that since the ancient Roman Empire once occupied most of Europe,Latin evolved into a universal language. While it was then adopted later by the Roman Catholic Church, I don't believe that the spread of early Christianity would be the underlying reason to draw the few who could afford an education (since there was no free public education in the Middle Ages) to learn Latin.  During the Middle Ages & Renaissance, those who could afford an education would be taught Greek & Latin in order to read works by ancient Greek philosophers and histories of Rome(and other works) that were written in Latin. As Renaissance mathematicians and other educated individuals began to write & publish their own works, they tended to write their works in Latin because of the likelihood that anyone with an education would be able to read them.  Thus, given that there is no indication that anyone in the wizarding world attends church services or is in any way religious, it seems unlikely that there would have been an active influence from the Catholic Church on the wizarding world; but education would more likely be an influence.

There is an additional possible reason for the use of Latin for casting spells.  Unlike English and many other languages, Latin is an inflected language.  A few examples of inflected languages today include Russian, Polish, German (via its definite articles), and Serbo-Croation.  In an inflected language, suffixes are typically added to the ends of nouns and adjectives to indicate the part of speech and/or gender.  Latin contains six declension cases:
the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative and vocative cases.

There is also a seventh locative case that is rarely less used.  (By comparison, German has four cases and Serbo-Croation has seven cases.)  English also contains cases, but is not inflected: the cases are defined either by position within the sentence or through the use of prepositions.  With inflection, Latin has no prepositions (it doesn't need any), neither does it have any definite or indefinite articles.  Latin also has a very rich method of verb conjugation.  So, the number of words necessary in English to express an idea is far greater than in Latin.

Additionally, since Latin is inflected, word order makes no difference: regardless of how the words are arranged,
unlike English, the meaning is the same. Thus, for spell casting, fewer words for each spell have to be memorized in Latin.

Hence, Latin simplifies the teaching of spells regardless of the primary spoken language of the wizard or witch, it preserves spells written in ancient times that have been passed down from generation to generation, and it reduces the number of words that have to be memorized for each spell.