You're still taking that idea too far. While intent is important, wand movements/incantations are necessary to perform magical spells, and saying that they "help to create a honed effect" is putting it far too lightly. The fact that Voldemort is an exception to this rule means little as his feats of magical prowess do nothing for the other 99.999% of the population.

If you want to make your Harry a moral foil with similar magical prowess to Voldemort, be my guest, but in canon the dark lord leaves everyone and their grandmother in the dust magically. Even Dumbledore, though he makes up for that with the Elder Wand.

OP: by the way, what the hell kind of topic is this? It made some decent, albeit rehashed, conversation, but you honestly made a thread discussing Voldemort's nose disfiguration and its effect on spell casting...

 

In OOTP Neville fails to cast a stunner in the DOM when his nose was broken. The incantation came out as "stubefy". That made me think about Lord Voldemort's lack of a nose and its effect on incantations.

 

But even ignoring the fact that you're drawing comparisons between an incompetent fifteen year old and magical genius Dark Lord, Voldemort doesn't have a broken nose. Despite not having a nose, his voice is articulate apart from the whole hissing thing. But the point is, he does not struggle with pronounciations, because magic. So why would he not be able to articulate an incantation?

In regards to the argument about intent vs. incantations, I haven't even been here long and I've seen this argument repeated over and over. It's acknowledged that JKR's magic system doesn't make sense, and then you choose to argue your cases anyway. The answer is that you're all correct, because the magic system is stupid, and no amount of perfectly valid evidence in favour of opposing theories will change that it just doesn't make any damn sense.

 

Guess I'll throw in my 2 cents then. I always assumed that wand movements/incantations were far more important when you've yet to actually master the spell. It's been a while since I've read the books but I don't recall all that much wand movement in duels.

 

The amount of wand movements in duels is never described in the books, you are probably thinking of the movies. And the duels in the movies are just stupid.

As has been said, JKR did not really care to ask herself these questions so logically she did not provide us with the answers to them. Makes for nice debate though

 

Makes for a pointless debate is what it does. Just accept that it doesn't make sense and move on. Most fanfics have their own internal system anyway.

 

All this aside, Voldemort does have a nose, It's just a snake-like one rather than a human one.

 

As Commander Bond said, "The Tongue and throat are used for pronunciation and enunciation . . .". The rest, though, was inaccurate. The nose is used in the pronunciation of Nasal consonants, and nasalized vowels. The sound, [m], for example, is little more than a with the nasal track open to allow air to escape despite the labial blockage of the air-flow through the mouth. That is to say, if you didn't allow this air to escape through your nose, you literally would be pronouncing a , not an [m].

Due to the bell shape of the nasal passage, the nose lends a "ringing" quality to sounds sent through it.

Assuming that Voldemort's nose is flatter than a normal human being's, it stands to reason that this "ringing" quality might be of a higher pitch, but that's about it--and most importantly, only when he pronounced [m], [n], and [ŋ] (the ng in sing), not when he pronounced any other word: those would come out no different from any other person's.

Someone brought up Neville's "Stubefy!" Since there are no nasal consonants in the word, there's actually no reason a blocked up, bloody nose would have any effect upon his pronunciation of "stupify." In fact, when you pronounce the word, you unconciously close your nasal passage so as not to produce [znumivaɪ].

 

...

Now you've got me all hot and bothered.

 

Rin that was awesome. The word intent may not be mentioned but I thought that they explain there has to be a want/understanding. I'm thinking of HBP, don' have my books on me sadly to check.