So I was wondering, after seeing a few things inthis thread about wand movements, and incantations and so on, whether someone's accent would effect spellcasting?

I, for one, cannot pronounce a 'th'. That becomes vat, Thor becomes for, and so on. Depending on who you ask, this is either due to the accents I grew up around, inherited, or just laziness. Would this mean that any spell I cast starting with a th sound would be uncastable/wrong?

Does this also mean that this is the cause of (movie canon's) Seamus's habit of making things explode?

 

If you have problems with dipthongs, you'd need a Gregorovitch wand. His wands would understand you fine.

As for Seamus, I'm reminded of a Denis Leary bit:

"That's what we Irish guys do; we hold things in until we blow up. Sometimes you hear about bombs going off in London. They're not bombs- they're Irish guys, blowing up."

 

So you're name would be "Vaumologist?" .

As for accents, I imagine vey would pose a problem for some spells. Vough, I think your wand would eventually learn what you meant. ut going by Canon, Ron not pronouncing the levitation spell correctly, I would think saying it the right way would be important at first.

 

You assume that other areas of the world don't have their own incantations. It would be rather odd if Chinese wizards used quasi-Latin incantations.

 

But would a Chinese levitation have the same mechanics as the quasi-Latin? I just wondered, after seeing you post in the wand motion thread, as the 'th' thing carries over into my internal voice - when I think the words.

And @iLost - fourmologist, yes. I can do the th sound if I make an effort, but there are very few situations where it matters.

 

Why would they have different incantations? HP still isn't the Dresden Files where wizards can choose their incantations. Harry didn't even know what Sectumsempra did before he cast it, and yet the spell still had its usual effect. It's clear that for any spell, there is only one incantation.

 

No, it's clear that an incantation is linked in a quasi-fixed way to an effect. That doesn't mean there aren't multiple incantations that can achieve the same effect.

 

And yet it's likely that magic use evolved differently in different parts of the world - the Roman Empire never took over China. So the incantations are different, and the spells are likewise not the same.

Sniped: or what Taure said. Though I find it more likely that there are multiple spells to achieve the same (or similar) effects, though I guess that's the same thing.

 

Technically, you are right. There is no conclusive evidence to disprove your theory, but it seems implausible to assume that all Europe would use the same incantations unless they actually had to.

 

It's weird, since we don't really have any idea where the latin-esque casting came from. We can assume it's derivative of the Roman Empire; however, it never reached far into Germania, and went nowhere into Scandinavia, the Baltic Sea territories, the Heart of Africa, China, India, and the Americas. It would be absurd to suggest that these places all had developed the same language for casting. While I can imagine that with this style of casting spread throughout Europe, that doesn't reason out that it's the most common system in the world. We can't assume that the latin-esque casting is the most efficient system in the world.

What little exploration there's been in fanfiction seems to assume that natives from non-European parts of the world would be more ritual-based, and less efficient and effective overall. Why that's assumed is a whole other discussion. Personally, I don't see why non-Europeans wouldn't be able to develop and strengthen their own magical systems through their own abilities. It would be absurd if Europeans were the only ones who truly mastered and understood magic because of their ability to speak Latin. And why would the desire to be schooled in magic grow only in Europe? Why couldn't there be schools where one learns magic in places like India and China that have longstanding, rich cultures and histories?

Using this logic, I think that there's little doubt that the language itself doesn't necessarily translate into a desired spell. Surely, there was magic before latin. I think it's another discrepancy in Rowling's world, when professor Flitwick tells everyone to be careful how they pronounce their spells or they could get a buffalo on their chests.

Alright, enough rambling.

 

You're forgetting that the official language of Europe for well over a thousand years was Latin. Pretty much anyone literate during that time knew Latin, and many others were familiar with it because of the Catholic Church. The Roman Empire may not have reached into Germania, but its language sure did.

 

And here you assume that the Latin sounding incantations don't actually predate Latin... The fact that JKR picked them from Latin doesn't necessarily mean that wizards did.

 

Unless you base your assumption on the fact that the Roman Empire rose from the beings that invented (or originally used) magic, then it's more likely that each magical culture adapted from its respective muggle culture..

 

Gentlemen...

What I offhandedly said but still support is that it's the wand that understands Latin and Greek. If your pronunciation is off, the wand won't know what you're saying and won't produce the proper effect.

If you're taught a spell from another language, your understanding of it is what you communicate to your wand- you're both suffering under a learning curve.

A Gregorovitch wand may be enchanted to understand Latin, Greek, old Slovenian and Lithuanian, but it will probably expect your 'v' to sound like a 'w'.

How does that work for you?

 

This, I find hard to believe. Many of the incantations have non-latin etymologies: the most obvious one to come to mind being, pack (OotP, ch. 3). Others include, of course, avada kedavra, which comes from Aramaic; waddiwasi, which comes from two languages: Swedish vadd (wad), and French vas y (go there) (PoA, ch. 7); alohomora, from Malagasy, in Madagascar, and the list goes on.

I would wagers that there is something far less "magical" about the incantations, and far more "I R NEED WRDZ FR SPLLLLLL." I would further wager that the vast majority of incantations are not from the time of the Roman Empire at all, or even from the days of the founders, but probably from the 1500s (though, more likely 1700s).

Roman wizards likely used a combination of orally preserved Proto-Indo-European incantations, a smattering of Greek-based and Celtic-based incantations, and a very small number of outright Latin incatations:

The Roman equivalent of Tonks in OotP(3) would have pointed her wand and said "Colligo!"

The word "pack" used in any sense of the way we use it today only goes back to its borrowing into English from Middle Dutch or Middle High German, which means about A. D. 1200: 800 years after the end of the Roman Empire.

Modern day incantations appear to be the result of wizards and witches (again, probably from the 1700s, when English suddenly bloated up full of Latin-based words: we went from Latin-borrowings comprising a smidgen of English to comprising a full two-thirds of our total vocabulary, giving rise to the misconception that English is a Romance language and not a Germanic one) who did not fully understand proper Latin grammar who were attempting to attach to a certain effect a word or phrase that would ostensibly mean something to them, but would otherwise not show up in everyday conversation. This would explain incantations like wingardium leviosa.

Wingardium Leviosa is comprised of the English word wing (which was borrowed from Danish wingæ around 1150), a clear mis-declension of arduum, or possibly arduius, and the nominative plural neuter comparative of levis: leviora (where the incantation's creator forgot that VsV > VrV in Latin; e. g., opus and opera). Combine the fact that the Statute of Secrecy had then only recently been passed with the massive influx of imperfectly understood Latin vocabulary, and you have a recipe for exactly this sort of bizarre mix of English and pseudo-Latin.

Another reason, of course, that the incantations probably couldn't predate Latin is simply that Historical Linguistics has done a pretty accurate job of telling us what Proto-Italic (which became Latin) sounded like, and about 150 years of research have yielded a fairly good guess at what Proto-Indo-European (which birthed Proto-Italic) sounded like as well. ALL of the pseudo-Latin incantations sound nothing like it - what they do sound like is a bunch of mis-declined/mis-conjugated latin verbs, nouns, and adjectives.

 

When I saw this was a thread on on language/words, I was waiting for Rin to show up with a big TL;DR where he drops words like Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and all sorts of other shit.

I guess he didn't dissapoint..

 

Glad to be of service. :awesome

TBH, I was actually avoiding it for precisely that reason - I knew I'd end up doing another TL;DR after face-palming a number of times.

Anyway, I think Taure's got the right of it in this thread, for those of you who TL;DRed my post.

As for spell-casting in other cultures, the movie Onmyouji (I & II) gives a really good depiction of what Japanese witches and wizards probably learn as traditional Onmyoudou (Yin-Yang magic). Their incatation for the levitation spell most likely takes the form of something along the lines of 翼高上行 Yoku Kou Jou Kou! or something like that.

 

Yet there is absolutely no evidence for it. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but a simple application of Occam's razor would suggest contrary.

Anyway, why did you even revive this thread?

 

This is truth.

But this is the extent of any thought JK has spent on it.

 

That's my talent- the ability to suppress all vestiges of my higher education in order to think like a mid-forties divorcee.

(this also may explain my successful career in IT)