What exactly is the trace? If it is placed on the person how does is come about? Does the Ministry cast it?

What are people's opinions on if and how it can be removed early?

 

I've always been of the opinion that the trace was a spell, cast by the Ministry, placed over all of Britain, and not the individual themselves. Somehow, it can detect when, and where, a spell is cast in the presence of an underage witch/wizard, and notifies someone accordingly.

Which means that it can't be removed early, because it's not on any individual. You'd have to destroy the spell entirely, affecting everyone, if you wanted to avoid it.

 

Wife and I were flipping through the channels today and landed on a station playing "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," so we left it on and watched it for a while.

When the graveyard scene came up, I swear Voldemort said "Bumbledore," instead of "Dumbledore." I stopped it, backed it up, and hit play, and sure enough, it sounded like Bumbledore. Even asked my wife, and she said she heard the same thing.

Anyone else catch this? Am I just hearing things or does he actually say "Bumbledore?"

 

I remember thinking it sounded like "Bumbledore". I think it was just that he got a bit overenthusiastic. The subtitles read "Dumbledore", so I think it was just a bit extra spit in that moment XD

 

That or the person writing the subtitles was a DLPer who would have rather killed himself than type in "Bumbledore" for a subtitle.

 

Are you talking about 1:45 from this scene? Sounds like Dumbledore to me.

By the way, after four parts done by Yates, it seems a little weird watching other directors' takes on the Harry Potter's world.

 

It sounds like Dumbledore there, definitely. ON the broadcast however, it really did sound like Bumbledore.

 

I have a question. Which is correct Spelt of Spelled? I was looking at an argument and I thought that both were acceptable but one of the people said that spelt was wheat. Is it a U.S thing? Do they not use Spelt?

 

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spelt
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spelled

Spelt is a name for a subspecies of wheat, yes, but it's also 'British English' acceptable. Spelled is just you Yankee's bastardized 'American English' coming into play, again.

 

In regards to the question about the trace, Bill Door's explanation would rationalize the fannon idea that those who live in magical homes can cast spells year around as the spell would be unable to determine if they had cast the spell or someone else had. In regards to canon it was also explain why Dobby's magic caused an Underage Use of Magic warning for Harry. However it's also contradicted because I seem to recall Mrs. Weasley shouting at the twins about using magic over the summer. I would agree that it is some sort of overarching spell such as that simply because the idea of their being any kind of spell on the actual wand makes me think that not only is that a no-no etiquette wise but the foreign magic might interrupt the user's magic.

 

Fortunately, as Sesc pointed out, "being" is, in this case, a noun. Unfortunately for ESL students, the English gerund (nominal form of a verb) and present participle (present-tense adjectival form of a verb) are the same: for be, it's "being". This is easier to illustrate with walk: "the walkingdog" vs. "walking is a good form of exercise". In the sentence, "the dog is walking," walking is used as an adjective no different from red in "the dog is red". That's current English morphosyntax. A look back as late as the mid 1800 reveals that "the dog is walking" would have been "the dog is on walking" (this gave rise to the "the dog is a' walking" form), clearly indicating that the -ing form was purely a noun and has only recently acquired an adjectival role.

More accurately, me is oblique, since it's role is essentially "non-nominative" ("I" being nominative).

Anyway, either form is correct, but they're not really interchangeable.

"my being here" is a noun phrase (two or more constituent parts that work together to form a single, complex noun), so it can appear in any place in a sentence:

Nominative: "My being here gave him a headache."
Oblique: "He attributed his headache to my being here."
c.f.:
Nominative: "The dog's barking gave him a headache."
Oblique: "He attributed his headache to the dog's barking."
and
Nominative: "The dogs gave him a headache."
Oblique: "He attributed his headache to the dogs."

Note also a purely accusative usage: "His summoning spell caused my being here."

On the other hand, "me being here" is not a noun phrase. In this case, "being here" is an adverbial phrase modifying the sentence in some way, and occurs independently of "me":

"He attributed his headache to me being here."

Here, he is blaming me, specifically, for his headache, and my being here is incidental to that.

Really, what this comes down to is focus upon who or what is doing something to whom or what. When you use "my being here" you are focusing on the act: the being here part; i.e., my presence caused something to happen, not me, personally.

When you use "me being here" you're saying that I was acted upon, probably as a consequence of my presence (since you're mentioning it), but you're not focusing upon my presence.

You are quite correct in saying that "Me being here" cannot occur at the beginning of a sentence and be grammatically correct (since "me" is oblique). One could say "I being here gave him a headache," but we would more naturally nominalize the who phrase and say "My being here gave him a headache."

This is a case, I think, of the "rules" being too vague and not taking into account the subtle nuances of real grammar.

Incidentally, a lot of languages use a genitive form in place of a nominative form in constituent sentential clauses (Finnish and Japanese both come to mind). This occurs so frequently that nominative forms often disappear to be replaced by their genitive forms (or they merge), and another form takes the genitive's place. C.f. most Romance languages, where the accusative and genitive in Latin merged with the Nominative, and the ablative form (which more often than not took the particle "de") took the place of the genitive. Hence why "Voldemort" means both "Flight of death" and "Flight from death". In Latin, these would be unambiguously distinguished.

---------- Post automerged at 09:01 ---------- Previous post was at 08:48 ----------

Bill Door answered this perfectly, but I figured I'd add that the why has more to do with English stress patterns than anything else:

DRIF-ted OFF to SLEEP vs. DRIF-ted OFF IN-to SLEEP :: -.-.- vs. -.--.-

DRIF-ted OFF IN-to a DEEP SLEEP :: -.--..--

As for why one sounds better than the other? Well, who knows? It's just related to the stress pattern that Anglophonic ears find euphonious. Francophone or Deutschophones or Hispanophones might not agree.

 

I'm not from the U.S.
I'm Canadian and I've always used Spelt.
I was just wondering.

 

Fair correction Sesc. I was mostly theorizing...

 

I looked at that phrase, saw noun, verb - and didn't even think about it being a gerund. :facepalm

As far as my comment goes about changing rules, I was thinking about rule changes such as the singular possessive that ends with "s" now adding "'s" instead of just an apostrophe (in the case of proper names, excluding those that do not end in a silent "s"). That's a rule change that's occurred in the last twenty or so years. Chicago Manual of Style, Turabian Style Guide, I think even MLA has made the shift over the last two editions.

As far as Nominative-Genitive merging goes, I think that's not specific to nominative/genitive, but part of an much larger shift from deriving meaning from morphology and case systems, to deriving it from sentence structure. For example, in what's called "biblical" Hebrew, a genitive is only found by syntax, something called a construct relationship, or construct chain. Possessive can even be shown outside of this syntax by using a specific letter attached to a word. Yet, years before (as seen in other, older Semitic languages--Akkadian, Amorite), there definitely were distinct forms. But by the time biblical Hebrew, Phoenician-Canaanite, and later Aramaic, most of that had dissappeared - in the same way the case systems as it relates to morphology in English have disappeared for the most part (with some obvious examples and more subtle elements still remaining).

Makes a lot of sense and something I should have remembered. Thanks.

 

God damnit, Rin - stop making my brain esplode!

 

In PS Dumbledore tells McGonagall that he can't get rid of Harry's scar. That doesn't mean that other people can't, right? I'm not talking about a superwizard who can pawn Dumbledore but maybe someone whose specialty is healing curse scars/damage.

 

I'd say that just because Dumbledore can't do it doesn't mean that no one else can.

Did Wizarding Britain ever have colonies or was that just a Muggle thing?

 

This is the only canon information I can find on this, and it does seem to suggest there were wizard colonists.

 

I would say that at that stage, no-one could heal it, because it was still a Horcrux. Post canon, maybe it could have been healed.

 

But, as Dumbledore says- "Magic always leaves traces, sometimes very distinctive traces". The Horcrux being gone does not imply that all traces of the magic that held it there are gone.