Magical Latin

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 186109

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, No Limberger <no.limberger at ...> wrote:

No.Limberger: 
> 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.

Geoff:
I would agree that Latin acted as a lingua franca. In the same way, 
English does today, especially with speakers who belong to a small 
linguistic group. It is widely used also in communications for air traffic 
and naval contacts and, of course, the spread of computing which has 
most basic commands in English has encouraged this development 
even further.

However, as I said a few days ago, education was often conducted in 
the monasteries and abbeys so that students would not only be taught 
in Latin but would also come in contact with Christianity - in particular 
Catholicism.

I might say that the fact that we see no particular evidence of worship 
in the Wizarding World does not rule it out. It is just not germane to 
the story lines n the same way that we are not told regularly when Harry 
goes for a bath or changes his socks.

No.Limberger:
> 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.

Geoff:
You seem to have overlooked French which certainly has inflections for 
gender.

English does contain remnants of inflections which can operate without 
prepositions, especially personal pronouns. Examples include: him, her, 
me, mine.... inter alia.

Odd that I studied Latin to the equivalent of OWL level and do not recall 
a locative case; my Oxford Latin primer seems not to know either. In the 
UK, the cases are normally quoted in the order Nominative, Vocative, 
Accusative, Genitive, Dative and Ablative but that's perhaps a matter of 
taste.

The great virtue of using extra words in English is that we can express 
far more nuances of meaning than Latin - and many other modern 
languages.

No.Limberger:
> 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.

Geoff:
Quite true. You can play with word order in English - and also in 
German - to an extent but the classic Hogwarts case of this is, of course, 
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus" which, although slighty inaccurate 
Latin can be shunted around without losing its meaning.