It is.

It's a chicken egg under a toad. Simple enough. Hard part comes from the fact that as soon as it hatches it's as much of a danger for the wizard who 'created' it than for anyone else. Its poison kills you in a matter of minute and it's gaze instantly. And lets remember that parseltongue doesn't make the snake necessarily listen to you.

 

Yep, Chicken and Toad, twisty shit and goings on, taken from; Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them


It's also a mythological creature in its own right...
the basilisk of Cyrene is a small snake, "being not more than twelve fingers in length," that is so venomous that it leaves a wide trail of deadly venom in its wake, and its gaze is likewise lethal

 

What I am trying to imply is that the information may be wrong in order to save them from death

 

Here's something from the HP wiki that I thought was interesting: The male can be distinguished from the female by a single scarlet plume on its head. I don't remember seeing a scarlet plume on it's head in the movies or reading it in the books so by that we can say it's female. Unless I'm wrong, it's been ages since I've seen or read and story.

If they have genders does that mean it's possible for them to breed? By having a male and female you could bypass the "Chicken's egg beneath a toad" and have them either lay their own eggs or do live births.

 

I know about Fantastic, etc. The point to be made is that it is a school textbook which is an overview of a wide variety of magical creatures, not a complex analysis of any one in particular. You just don't give some facts to kids.

Idiotic ranting it may be, but dicking around with two non-magical animals that somehow create one of the more dangerous things ever is rather...:facepalm The implications are just so unwieldy.

One question that springs to mind is a basilisk farm. Eggs and toads are cheap, blind them right after hatching, defang them and then you've got purses and boots! It's weird how plausible that sounds.

 

Pasreltongue is too over-hyped in my opinion, I don't think there are any arcane spells or abilities related to it. If it had been the case, we had the whole Gaunt family( Marvolo and Morfin atleast) parseltongue, who were nothing extraordinary. I don't think they can control a snake, they can instruct something but not outright control it. If they could control snakes then Morfin would have killed Riddle Sr. by just using a single venomous snake.

In the book, process of Basilisk breeding is kind of lame. Their must be some extraordinary factor in the whole process, like a special equinox or something. Otherwise, I shudder to think...

 

I give you mules.
Yes they have genders, and yes female mules can breed with purebred horses or donkeys, but two mules? No.
A similar case can be made for basilisks, hybrids (albeit magical) that they are.

 

I agree with both of these points actually. It’s doubtful some random dark wizard would be knocking out ten of the things an hour and using their skin as boot leather.

Then again, killing one is supposed to be as simple as introducing it to a Rooster’s Crow.

To go with your “first egg laid of a virgin idea,” I’ve always kind of thought that Rooster thing must have been more complicated, that was just as understated in the books.

…

That aside, I’m actually guilty of liking the idea of Parselmagic, and even Parselscript; the language of snakes as put onto parchment, given the reptiles are so well known for their expertise with pencils

 

You can understand Parseltongue even if you don't speak it. Dumbledore was able to understand it.

And it seems since Ron can speak one word, it is not impossible to learn how to pronounce it as well. It might sound like you're french and you learned english, but I guess it would be still understandable.

 

And exactly that is the point that makes it lame.

When she introduced it it seemed like a great idea - a magical ability inherited by bloodline. With Dumbledore and even Ron being able to learn it Rowling destroyed its magical part. Now Parseltongue is just an uncommon language like classical Greek.

I prefer fanfics which ignore canon and keep its restrictions.

 

I agree with this...to an extent. I believe that Parseltongue could be learned by wizards to communicate with other wizards. However, I don't believe that those wizards who had to learn Parseltongue would actually be able to understand snakes.

Snakes communicate by airborne vibrations, not necessarily sound. We humans communicate by sound. The delicacy of the vibrations a snake makes would be very difficult (maybe impossible...I'm not entirely sure) for us to pick up and translate to speech. I believe the magical side of Parseltongue is the Parselmouth's ability to not only communicate using the language (effectively creating the vibrations needed for a snake to understand them), but their ability to understand the snake in return.

How this becomes useful is open ended. I've always taken the opinion that snakes would make the best spies in an enemy encampment (at least when you don't have a rat animagus around to do the spying for you). If you could befriend a snake, you would have a very useful ally indeed.

 

Ignore this, my internet is being a pain.

 

Agreed. It was just a quick-and-easy breadcrumb. A fanon tweak I've read is the first crow at dawn, though I'd still nerf it down like I'd make creation more complex.

As to the magic of parseltongue: perhaps there should be a division between 'human' parseltongue and snakes'. A password can be faked. I had always assumed it was the power of communication with snakes as opposed to an actual language per se–since not every snake would know the same one, even if their brains could support a language as we know it.

Hence, another little assumption of mine was that the ability somehow conferred some human-like intelligence to the snake...

 

One idea would be to simply make humans speaking it well impossible due to anatomy of the throat. Afterall, animals can't possibly fluently speak human language, even if they were smart enough because of physical realities, so why should we be able to speak theirs? So a parselmouth could either inherit genes that modifies the throat or whatever, or their inherent magic does the modifications for them somehow, something along that line.

So Dumbledore learning to simply understand, not speak, parseltongue would have been ok, they're just sounds afterall.

If it were just one word passphrase, it might have slid but still that did weaken the foundation of the whole heir of slytherin idea immensely if anyone can do it given time and practice. Ron speaking the phrase was just obviously a long line of book 7 events to make the RW/Hr pairing more palatable. It would have been better set up for a spell to record a person's voice and Ron delivering Harry speaking the phrase by proxy that way imo.

 

While it's easier to assume it was passed by blood, considering Harry had none of Voldemorts DNA only his magic it would seem to me that it is a magical ability. Would a squib be able to speak parseltongue?

Have you thought they just weren't extraordinary wizards period? I believe it was said that none of them have gone to Hogwarts in generations and considering the parentage they certainly didn't get much by way of home schooling. Going on from my point from the previous quite, maybe it's the mother's magic that grants the parseltongue ability and if she didn't possess it neither did the child. Could be one reason they went so far even next to other pureblood families if when they married outside they lost it.

 

The best idea I've had for parseltongue was to have it be a method of deceiving legilimens via thinking in a language they're almost certainly not going to be able to understand. It would explain why Dumbledore learned it, though there's a good chance he did it because it interested him. Then again, you could learn Swahili and do just as well in the defence department.

 

I will probably never even attempt it but I was thinking something along those lines of tricking a legilimens, either thinking like a snake (Don't exactly know how you would do that) or just thinking in the language of snakes. It's an interesting idea in my opinion. It's a pity it's not expanded upon.

 

That's really not the impression I got about how legilimency works. Snape was adamant that it's not the same thing as mind-reading and although he doesn't really precisely explain the boundaries between the two I always got the impression that he meant it wasn't TV style telepathy (Matt Parkman from Heroes) where you 'read' the literal sentences of what that person is thinking.

Rather, from the examples of legilimency that we see (here, I'm thinking especially of the scene where Voldemort invades the mind of Gregorovich) I always thought that it was more about memories and emotions and images specifically. Like a pensieve it lets people look into the past as seen through someone's eyes, and feel their emotions.

On that basis, I'd say, unless Harry was to do everything in parseltongue 24/7 it's not going to help when ever someone actually uses the verbal spell on him. Furthermore, if it was a more subtle, detection of lies use of legilimency how would thinking in parseltongue stop someone from undergoing the normal responses (think of the true event, emotional awareness of lying) that come from telling a lie?

It's like using a lie detector. Speaking in a foreign language wouldn't prevent it from saying true or false.

 

It never made sense to me why the Hogwarts curriculum included teaching hormonal and emotionally unstable teenagers how to effectively massacre each other with deadly and obscure magical creatures.

 

It doesn't, it teaches them how to avoid being massacred by deadly and obscure magical creatures. It never teaches them how to order a dragon to attack someone, but it might teach them how to protect yourself and others from said dragon.