This is an idea I'd like to use for a fanfic. So, whereas snakes hiss by forcing air through a small opening to the trachea at the back of the mouth, humans obviously lack the physiology to replicate this ability. To compensate a, parselmouth would use magic to modify their breath and vibrate the tongue to form individual words in parseltongue.

In other words, by speaking parseltongue you channel magic through your mouth. I was thinking I could work this into an ability to use magic to control your voice, even when talking other languages. Things like volume, calming effects, coercion, perhaps even whispering across the room to specific people.

What does everyone else think?

 

Well, voice modifying spells like Sonorus and Silencio are canon so you have some foundation for this.

Also, any magic that allows me to talk like Darth Vader is magic I can get behind.

 

Or - and feel free to point it out if I'm saying something silly here - it's fucking magic and thinking that deep about it will lead you absolutely nowhere.

I mean, humans also lack the ability to transform themselves into animals, to throw out basically ghosts made of Happy Thoughts, or to make shit levitate. Doesn't seem to stop wizards.

 

Also it seems unlikely hissing can convey the full language of words English has. Thus it is probably something totally magical like snake telepathy with the hissy working as the incantation.

Makes Rons use of it totally implausible. How he could He get the nuance of the language by hissing at a door.

 

Well, every word we say is just sound, a vibration in the air. It isn't too farfetched, in my opinion, that Parseltongue can manipulate sound, the hissing and vibrations, in any number of ways to form words.

Also, by the time the last movie had come out, it had been a while since I'd read DH so I forgot that was actually canon in the books. Completely ridiculous that he could just mimic it so easily. Makes all the controversy about Harry being a Parselmouth in 2nd year seem pointless.

But, would Harry for example, be able to manipulate his voice to whisper into the ear of someone across the room without anyone in close proximity to him hearing based on my theory?

 

I could have sworn I read this in a fanfic just the other day.

 

Oh really? Did you remember how they implemented it? I think this idea has a lot of potential.

 

I'm looking the story up now. I think it was a HP/ME crossover where time-travelling Shepard is Harry's granddaughter.

Edit:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10312686/8/Harri-Potter-and-the-Lost-Shepard

Here it is. The story isn't exactly good but I have desperately been trying to find a decent HP/ME crossover.

 

"It's not your throat, Bill, it's your whole mouth," Harri replied. "Because it's a magical language, it partially transforms everything from your larynx to your tongue to speak it."

So in this story, it seems to imply that speaking Parseltongue invokes some sort of temporary transfiguration to speak the language, but I always understood it as an automatic conversion of the vibrations you create in the air.

 

Or, and this might be mind-blowing I know, or the entrance to the Chamber and subsequent doors were inanimate mechanisms, not actual living snakes

 

To be honest I prefer not to think of Ron's use of parseltoungue. Just seemed like a cheap way to get around Harry not having enough time to go to the chamber of secrets.

 

If your intention is to make something plausible then your character needs to be very creative and intelligent, because he would essentially be discovering a completely new method to use Parseltongue. But i don't think that only Parseltongue would be enough for this, it does not seem to be something that can be evolved beyond its limits, it seems that you can only learn how to use it, because its limits have already been defined.

However i do like the idea you suggested, using some sort of "voice magic" to affect emotions and being able to whisper to specific people would be quite interesting. I think your character should either find out about an existing method and improve it somehow or invent his own. Parseltolgue will be just his inspiration for it, something that will make him think of new methods.

 

This is a good 'aha!' for me; because the doors were enchanted to respond to the sound of a parselmouth asking for entrance, they wouldn't differentiate between an actual parselmouth and a simulation of that power. Ron wouldn't be able to say anything that actual snakes would understand, as the parselmouth ability imbues the snake with a kind of simulated elevation of language.

What I mean is: when Harry 'heard' the boa in the zoo say "Thanksss, amigo" it was his own brain translating the emotional context of the snake's gratitude into what he'd expect a South American creature to say. Much the same, the snake didn't hear Harry say anything so much as communicate sympathy for his situation and a desire to assist the snake in gaining its freedom.

Headcanon revised.

 

WTF? Its a password in parceltounge you fucking moron, It doesn't matter if its a door or a real snake. The whole point of a password if you say the right words and it opens, not just make some fucking noise. Its not a clapper lamp.

 

I'm a moron for thinking about something for more than two seconds and being intelligent enough to come up with an explanation for it instead of whining about how it doesn't fit my personal headcanon? That's a new one

But hey, I'll actually explain anyway. The typical Android phone has a speech recognition background service that's utilized by, amongst other things, Google Now. As a trilingual and tech literate person, I use Tasker to create personalized commands for my phone, like "donne un coup de fil à (insert contact here)" for calls to francophone family. If I gave you a slip of paper with "dawn uhn coo doh fill ah Mahmawng" and told you to say "OK Google" then read that out, my phone will place a call to my mother. It doesn't matter that it's gibberish, it doesn't matter that you (likely?) don't speak French, it doesn't matter that you don't understand the ~nuances~ of the phrase, that it literally means "to give a blow of the line", it doesn't matter that your accent is all wrong and you probably didn't pronounce the "l" in "fil" or the "n" in "maman" right. It's going to make the call, not because it's a "clapper lamp", but because it's a highly sophisticated piece of tech that's designed to (ideally) recognize speech with a high accuracy rate independent of accent or slurring. It's not a person who may give a verbal response that you don't understand. My phone's job is to pick up the vibrations generated by your voice, compare it to the frequency (and wavelength), pitch and timbre of my pre-recorded sample, and take the pre-specified action.

I trust I don't have to explain how this extends to Harry, the sink, and Ron. And by the way it's "Parseltongue", not "parceltounge".

 

I think the point being made is that a password is supposed to be secure, Android voice recognition is functionality over security because it's supposed to be easier to use and people would be pissed if they had to say it 3 or 4 times because there is some background noise or you have a head cold.

Salazar Mahfuckin' Slytherin on the other hand likely preferred secure over user friendly which is why the password is in Parseltongue, an ability/language heavily associated with his bloodline.

Ron being able to hiss and spit his way in is like using a combination bike lock on some cabinet doors that you can jiggle open instead of a concealed wall safe with internal glass plating to prevent drilling access.

 

It wasn't Salazar who placed the entrance at the bathroom, it was Corvinus Gaunt. And do you really think he could have taught a sink Parseltongue? no, he just "recorded" the word "open" in Parseltongue and made the sink respond to that.

 

It's not voice recognition. It's speech recognition and natural language processing, a field which veers deep into AI territory. And while it may be easier to use (than voice recognition), it sure as heck isn't easier to code by any stretch.

Also it would be nice if you were clearer about which bits of your comment are your headcanon and which parts are text. The sink mechanism isn't a password, it's literally just Harry asking it to open. Much like using Google Now to call a person, or set a reminder, or play a song. It's an imperative, not a passphrase.

And like others have pointed out, it's a mechanism that was installed centuries after Slytherin's death, unless you think he looked into the future and used his time machine to set up his entrance in modern plumbing. Not to mention that he clearly is not employing any form of voice or otherwise secure recognition, as Harry (neither his blood, nor his heir, nor even his House, nor of his intentions) was able to get in in the first place. Similarly Harry was able to get into the Horcrux locket, even though by your logic it should have opened for no one but Voldemort and certainly not someone that was trying to destroy it.

I'm sorry but to be quite blunt the finer points of natural language processing are most probably way, way beyond your skill set and intellectual capability (I'm unashamed to say it's beyond my current self), so it's quite hilarious seeing you compare it to a combination bike lock.

More on topic though, for the fic I'm working on I'm treating Parseltongue not so much as a language (that requires both sides to be speaking it, I think) as a sort of interface that Parselmouths use to communicate with snakes. It's still on shaky ground, but basically a Parselmouth speaks Parseltongue but a snake does not speak Parseltongue, it simply hisses. So Dumbledore, a gifted linguist, could learn to understand Parseltongue, could maybe even converse in it with a Parselmouth, but cannot understand snakes. It deals with something that nags me a little about the whole thing: I dislike the sapient snake trope. Partly because real life snakes are lovably dumb creatures, but mostly because it's more than a little unnerving that a family (suborder?) that has a fleshed-out language is cheerfully used in potions and doesn't even have Beast status (the Basilisk does, I think, but no other snake species).

 

Yeah sounds good. I need a way for the coercion through the voice magic to be distinct enough to not seem like mind control, and I have no idea how the emotion manipulation would work out. Maybe giving courage and hope to some and destroying morale to enemies or something.