Magical Latin

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186108

Carol earlier:
> > 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.
>
Carol again:

first, thanks for responding to my post. I'm glad that someone else is interested in the hypothetical history of the (European) WW.

Let me just respond to a few points. First, between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, no one (or virtually no one) in the West was learning Greek. You had what remained of the Latin peoples, the Romanized Celts, and various barbarians, mostly Germanic but also including Picts, Scots, and even Huns, all of whom at that point spoke their own languages. Latin was preserved in the churches and monasteries. Anyone in the West who was literate read and wrote in Latin. The only education was provided by the Church or by clerics. Even kings and emperors were often illiterate in the so-called Dark Ages. (I like the story of Charlemagne keeping the alphabet under his pillow and struggling to learn it.) Even though Alfred the Great and others promoted literacy in their own languages (in his case, anglo-saxon) as well as Latin, their intention was primarily to spread Christianity (equivalent in their minds to "civilization"). Until the founding of Hogwarts around AD 1000, those Muggle scholars, mostly monks, would have been the only teachers available to young Wizards (unless they were home-schooled). 

The languages of the Gauls and other Romanized Celts eventually evolved into the various Romance languages; the Germanic languages eventually evolved into German, English, Dutch, etc. Some of the Celtic peoples, chiefly in the British Isles, kept their own languages, and young Wizards who weren't sent to the Muggle schools to learn Latin must have learned spells in their own languages. Young Witches would have had even more limited opportunities for education. Perhaps they were taught spells in their native language by their Witch mothers. Unlike Latin, however, none of those languages seems to be a *traditional* spell-casting language (unless such spells aren't taught at Hogwarts) though recent spells seem to have been invented in the language spoken by the inventor ("Obliviate," for example).

All of these peoples (except the Huns) became Christian, specifically Roman Catholic, by about AD 1000 (though there may have been pockets of people secretly practicing old religions such as Druidism as there were certainly "heretics"). Hogwarts, like the Muggle universities it seems to be based on (though it educates younger children of both sexes) would have shared that heritage. Classes most likely would have been conducted in Latin, a lingua franca for the Celtic, Anglo-Szxon, and Norman students, and the Christian holidays Christmas and Easter would have been celebrated then as now (though probably in different ways--no Father Christmas or chocolate Easter eggs, for example). We also have paintings of monks and the ghost of a friar, clear evidence of overlap between the Christian Muggle world and the WW before the Statute of Secrecy in 1692. (I realize that these holidays incorporate pagan elements, but the fact of their celebration suggests a Christian background to the school. The secularization within Hogwarts parallels the secularization of the outside world, especially Britain, but that secularization is largely a twentieth- (and twenty first-) century phenomenon.

With regard to Latin's being an inflected language, that's a good point, not so much because of the declensions as because of the conjugations. Most of the spells use the first-person singular form of the verb. (It would make more sense, IMO, to use the imperative mood, but maybe JKR wasn't familiar with it.) 

Setting aside real Muggle history and speculative WW history, probably the spells are in Latin (or dog Latin, not to be confused with pig Latin!) is that they "sound" magical (and vaguely medieval, in keeping with robes, cloaks, and castles with dungeons).

As a sidenote, I'm surprised that JKR's magical world contains so few Celtic elements. The Celts, especially the Druids, seem much more magical and mystical than the practical-minded Anglo-Saxons. I used to think of the Veil of Death in the Department of Mysteries, or rather, the archway that the veil covers, as a portal to the Underworld perhaps used in ritual sacrifices by the Druids. Maybe Salazar Slytherin was a Druid who considered himself a victim of religious persecution by Christian Muggles, but, clearly, he was in the minority given the celebration of Christian holidays at Hogwarts (and of Christmas by the people of Hogsmeade, if it existed in his time).

Carol, noting that the continued use of Latin as a lingua franca after the fall of the western Roman Empire is intimately connected with the Roman Catholic Church and the concept of Europe, especially Western Europe, as "Christendom" throughout the "Dark" and Middle Ages