I'm not entirely sure what are all the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration. We know that food is one of them and I'm guessing that love, knowledge, money and souls are the other ones (purely guesswork here).

However, for the sake of this thread, let's assume that one cannot use magic to create knowledge from nothing. You can't point a wand at your head and suddenly become smarter or acquire information from nowhere.

Because of that, learning other languages with magic would be impossible, or at least highly improbable.

But there might be another way to cheat around this limitation. Legilimency. I know Legilimency is used to view thoughts and memories, but what about intentions and meanings?

Say that you are English and you meet a man from, let's say Poland. You don't know Polish and he doesn't know English. Communication is going to be hard in this situation. However, what if you both used Legilimency on each other, not in full force, just a weaker version?

Would this spell help you understand what the other person is saying? It wouldn't translate things for you, but it would allow you to sense the meaning behind the unknown word.

For example, the Pole would say "Moja żona została porwana!" which means, "My wife has been kidnapped!". Legilimency wouldn't translate it perfectly, but show you something along "My-companion-gone"

What do you guys think? Good theory or bad theory?

 

I think your stipulation that magic cannot create knowledge needs refinement. We know that magic can give a wizard knowledge: the Point Me spell tells a wizard which direction is north. Prophecies tell wizards information about the future, the mirror of Erised tells wizards information about themselves. The Ministry also seems to have various spells to receive information about goings on around the country.

So simply "no knowledge" is too broad. I think it's better to say "magic cannot replace human creativity/ingenuity". You can't use magic to conjure a book that's never been written. You can't use magic to tell you about magic. Basically, you can't use magic to create novel information -- information that a person would normally have to work to create/develop/discover.

With respect to languages, it seems almost certain that magic can be used to enhance one's language learning capabilities - the number of languages Crouch knows is humanly impossible without the use of magic. But at the same time, learning languages can't simply be so easy as casting a spell or interacting with an enchanted object, because Percy believed Crouch's language skills worth boasting about. So it must still take work of some kind. Maybe a couple of months of work to reach competency in a language.

With regards to legilimency... we really don't know how it works well enough to answer. But my instinct would be to say that a complex linguistic thought cannot be so easily divorced from the language in which the thought is couched. It's not that I have a load of thoughts and then those thoughts are put in English. The thoughts are intrinsically linguistic. My mental stream of consciousness is essentially me speaking to myself.

So I don't think a thought as complex as "my wife has been kidnapped" could be understood. More basic things, yes, like the impulse to perform an action, which is not a linguistic thing. When I pick something up, I don't think "I'm going to pick this up" and then do it. I just do it. I imagine that stuff could be picked up by legilimency without a language barrier.

But also remember that legilimency isn't mind reading in the "access to a person's stream of consciousness" way. It's memory reading, not mind reading -- though it seems to have an application which allows one to know a person's imminent actions.

Edit: I guess the case of Crouch could be waved away as a unique magical ability like being a metamorphmagus.

 

I would think that a persons thoughts are in their own language truth be told...

 

That's not exactly giving knowledge in the way I meant it. The Mirror of Erised shows you your desires, but that knowledge already existed in your mind, the mirror simply displays it. The Point Me spell does not create a new direction and does not add information directly to your mind, in fact I'd argue it creates no information at all if it always does the same. A compass points north and yet I wouldn't call it creating information.

Regarding Time Turners, Prophecies (and to a certain extent Felix Felicis) I have a theory that time flows backwards in the Potterverse, with future happening first and in turn creating the past. So if future happens first, then the prophecies describe what has already happened. Felix Felicis doesn't give you luck: the fact that you were lucky in the future causes you to drink the potion. Same with time turners.

Now, why is it exactly humanly impossible? Wizards are different from regular humans after all. Parselmouths, Metamorphs, Werewolves. Perhaps being a wizard simply means that you can know that many languages, perhaps wizards have a larger 'memory space' and learn a little faster (though not super-fast).

Ah, but enhancing one's learning process isn't exactly creating knowledge from nothing. You still have to manually learn it (presumably). And spells which allow a faster learning rate lead to the dark valley of Super!Harry, so let's proceed with caution here.

That's true, thoughts are linguistic. But the meanings behind them are not. You could say 'the sun' and I could say 'słońce' but we both mean the giant ball of fire in the sky. We can know for certain that magic can affect concepts, such as the Defense Position at Hogwarts, so why not meanings of words?

Sure it could be understood. It only needs the right methods. For example, when two people with different languages want to communicate, they usually use their hands to try to show what they mean. Pointing a finger at yourself obviously means you talk about yourself. Making a stabbing motion can mean the act of murder. And so on...

Magic could work similarly. Going with the same example: "My *points finger at himself* wife *shows ring on finger* was kidnapped *imitates stealing and hiding away something*"

Basically, it doesn't translate, but shows you an imperfect interpretation of the thoughts of the other person. Legilimency could do so with very short bits of memories. And yes, Legilimency isn't viewing the current thoughts, but memories. However, something that happened a second ago is also a memory.

 

If you want to go the route of quick and easy language learning, I'd think the easiest way would be to buy the memories of speaking/understanding a language off someone else. Since learning a second language is a whole lot of memorizing semantic domains, syntax, and the oddities that creep up in idioms, having those memories would go about 60 to 80 percent in one's ability to comprehend a language. The other 20-40 percent would be pronunciation, learning how to recognize the aural and visual words, and being able to access the memories fast enough to put it all together.

There are, of course, a couple assumptions here. The first one, and it's not supported in the text (nor is it negated), is the ability to take someone else's memory and use it as your own.

The second is that a brain could hardwire the memories in any kind useful way that allows them to be used for anything other than accessing a narrative of someone doing something.

 

Btw, E. C. Scrubb, you bring forth an interesting point.

If you take a memory from your head and put it in a Pensieve, are you literally transferring it or are you creating a copy?

If it is a copy, then it would be a world/story-breaking element. Why bother with schools like Hogwarts or Beauxbatons if you can buy a vial of insta-learn memories on Diagon Alley?

 

Because you don't learn respocibility.

 

I'd say it can be either a copy or a move, at the will of the provider. This doesn't break the world because:

A. Pensieves aren't widely available

B. Seeing someone else's memory doesn't mean your thoughts experience the same intellectual connections. All you see is a memory being played out. I could see this as a way to distribute pure lectures, but it remains for the student to absorb and integrate the knowledge. Also, there is no indication that the speed of memory assimilation is any faster than real-time. At least within the Pensieve, Harry experienced the memories at normal speed. They were pruned to the important parts, sure, but it still took time to review the memories and discuss them.

 

I wonder if it's possible to implant knowledge using the false memory charm Hermione used in the Deathly Hallows, theoretically the caster would simply have to add the new knowledge without changing what was already present in the persons mind. The caster could simply add his own knowledge into the person whom the charm is being cast on. I know the false memory charm is a canon spell, so I wondered if it could do something in it's limits that was not was it was intended for, and I realized this could be potentially possible, theoretically at least.

 

I thought the same about the Imperius Curse. If I put someone under it and order him to do something complicated, for example open a safe using a certain code, will he be able to do it? Will I be able to send the relevant information to him using the curse?

 

I want to point out that people learn things differently, so the things they learn could be stored differently as well. For instance, I'm a visual-kinetic learner -- I learn by watching and doing. Others are audio learners, or still others are logical-linguistic learners (the main method schools use to teach). I'd say that plays a big impact on how you store your memories.

So I doubt anyone can simply enter the mind of another and pull complete knowledge that's immediately usable -- what if the other person learns purely through audio-linguistic and the person copying the memory is a visual learner? In the end, you're still stuck -- you likely have to devote a lot of time and effort to translate their memories into something you can use.

Just my 2 cents.

 

Warning: boring linguistics ahead.

Using magic to facilitate language-acquisition, IMO, is quite easy.

The first, and most obvious would be using magic to help the brain quickly and permanently fuse certain combinations of sounds to certain "areas" of semantic space. By this, I mean that there's never a full 1:1 translation between any two words of any two languages:

Lutris can correct me if I'm wrong about there not being any overlap between kyoumibukai and omoshiroi, but that's the impression that I get--both translate to "interesting", whilst omoshiroi also translates to "amusing".

Magic could help you nail that down really fast--flipping through the dictionary like that John Travolta Scientology propaganda movie whose name I can't be fucked to remember.

Anyway, the second, and more interesting way magic can help you learn languages is flipping all the necessary mental toggle-switches that represent the Linguistic Universals (LUs) to "neutral". LUs are a (rather large) set of strong tendencies linguists have found regarding languages spanning the globe. None of them are truely universal, but damned if you're not likely to find one where you find others.

Here's one of the simpler examples (and English is one of the exceptions that proves the rule):

In languages where the direct object of the sentence follows the verb, then adjectives and relative clauses will follow the nouns they modify; and, corollarily, in languages where the direct object of the sentence precedes the verb, then adjectives and relative clauses will precede the nouns they modify.

Examples: French and Japanese
Counter examples: English. This is only half a counter-example, though, because, although our adjectives precede our nouns, our relative clauses follow our nouns, as is the expected behavior.

Anyway, there's a whole slew of these switches in your brain, and they're all set to neutral at birth, but get flipped to one position or the other as you acquire your native language. When people learn a new language (as opposed to acquiring a native language--two very different processes), if they do everything right, at best, they flip a number of these switches back to neutral where necessary.

One of the reasons that asians sterotypically leave off the "the"s and "a(n)"s and never pluralize nouns when speaking English is that most Asian languages don't mark plurals on anything and don't make use of articles like the/a. French, German, and Spanish, et al, virtually demand it in almost every case, leading to stereotypical over-usage when speaking English.

I don't think there needs to be any complex understanding of this on the part of a wizard: merely that they wish to learn a language, and that seems like a rather efficient and straight forward way magic would alter one's brain to facilitate nearly native-level fluency.

 

Having taken classes in Linguistics and Neuroscience I can back up what Rin has mentioned above.

On the topic of memory transfer. Biologically it is partially impossible because the neural networks that encode for memories, skills and other such learned things form somewhat uniquely in every person. However, at least I know this to be true of neural activity maps for smells, certain things can cause highly similar activity in the brain. So, theoretically if magic can bridge the gap between the things with similar neural activity between people and the things with unique neural activity between people, one could have a somewhat "hard science" explanation to use for justifying a method of person-to-person memory transfer learning.

Side note: It was once my life's dream to figure out how to do this in the real world. I then took classes about neuroscience and realized how utterly difficult if potentially impossible it would be with current day computing ability, sensor resolutions and understanding of brain plasticity.