this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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This is such a pet peeve of mine.
Why are anglo writers obsessed with using latin as some ancient, mystical language? Why would Latin be tied to magic in any way? Do they realize that Latin was spoken all through Europe for millenia and its vulgar form evolved into tons of current languages? Or that people were using latin in churches, courtrooms and universtities all the way up to the 20th century? Latin was an optional in my high school. I took two years.
If random Latin words could do magic all of Europe would have been constantly exploding. Newspapers would be covering the latest magic volcano to pop up in Southern France. World War II movies would include accidental summonings.
Also, for us romance language speakers it sounds vaguely understandable, so the weird things they use for spells sound goofy as hell. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than using fake Latin-sounding made up stuff as in Harry Potter.
Latin was the lingua franca for the educated western world for centuries. Texts on alchemy, mysticism, and religion were all written in Latin. Church rituals were performed in Latin.
Most magic in fiction has its roots in the past. What language would be more fitting?
Definitely a better pick, if you're just gonna piggiback on a language. Still raises a ton of questions, though.
Few people know what Aramaic sounds like. It might be good for books (the Laundry Files uses Enochian, and nobody knows what that sounds like), but for a media with sound Latin checks all the boxes.
No, wait, it was not "lingua franca in the educated western world", vulgar latin was just... the language a lot of Europe spoke for centuries.
People think of Latin as this highbrow educated thing, because that's what was left of it after the development of romance languages from vulgar Latin, but Latin was just what normal people used to talk to each other for a long time.
And yes, sure, texts on alchemy, mysticism and religion were written on it.
Also texts on food recipes, tax collection, how the tree from your neighbour's yard was blocking the sun to your oranges and the rude graffitti in the tables of the pub.
Honestly, I don't see why the chosen language would have to matter to your fictitious magic system. Surely if you have to say words and words mean things, the language doesn't affect what the words mean. I tend to like it when people still manage to tap into magical thinking without the crutch of pulling what they think sounds old-timey from somewhere. Neil Gaiman, Jim Henson or Grant Morrison were/are really good at it.
Or, you know, if you're a meganerd like Tolkien you can always just... make a whole new language for it. That also works.
It depends on the place. In France for example it was always considered the language was gallo-roman, because they never completely spoke Latin. Latin was the written language, but the spoken language was a mix of celtic and Latin. And by the XIIth century it was old French. Southern France, occitan is even worse: it started to be latinised in the IInd century, and mixed again with celtic in the VIth century.
Those languages are roman languages, so they indeed are majorly Latin in their origin, but they never were actual Latin. It's not even sure most people actually ever spoke Latin. It was very common in the past to use translators to communicate.
So do you think magic is picky about spelling, then?
Because if you've ever heard our best guess for what European languages sounded like next to Latin what you're basically saying here is that magic in English would work as long as you have a thick Scottish accent but wouldn't do well at all with a New York accent.
And at that point I think none of the Latin you hear in movies would work at all, because most of it sounds like an English person trying to sing a song in Portuguese they heard once in the 90s.
Well, that depends on your magic I guess. I'm not the one to say merely speaking Latin would summon demons.
Well, yeah, but seeing how all magic is made up, when the writer of the story makes it up to work like that I happen to find it pretty silly.
You know, a pet peeve.
I'm not talking about vulgar Latin or the romance languages.
For about a millenia and a half, everything that could be considered scholarship was written in Latin. Newton's Principia Mathematica? Latin. Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium? Latin. Kepler's Astronomia nova? Latin.
Almost every educated person in the western world learned Latin. That's how they communicated with their colleagues in other countries - letters written in Latin. That's why it was a lingua franca.
Yes? I think you may have missed my point in the shuffle.
What I'm saying here is that Latin doesn't make sense as a mystical, secret language for magic because it was too common. I'm not saying it wasn't the language of scholars, I'm saying that not only was it the language of scholars, so every treatise on optics or history would have triggered accidental lightning bolts, but it was also a commonly spoken language as well.
Hey, you know what is lingua franca for science while being widely spoken? English.
Does that sound mystical to you?
If English had been a dead language for fifteen hundred years and was only used by people who talk about things only a tiny subset of the population understands?
Yeah, it would seem pretty mystical.
But that's my point, it hasn't been, and it wasn't.
Again, Latin was mandatory in my high school for a year, optional for two more. In the 1990s. It's still optional, I believe. My parents went to church in Latin as kids.
So no, it doesn't sound mystical outside the anglosphere, it sounds like crusy old priests, lawyers and boring lessons. Today.
You are very much in the minority as someone who has studied Latin. Very few non-Catholic high schools even offer it, much less make it mandatory.
And sure, Catholic mass was held in Latin back in the day. Personally, I suspect that's a reason it's associated with rituals and magic. What is a priest doing, if not invoking mystical powers beyond the understanding of man? What language would someone use to invoke the powers of Satan?
Outside the anglosphere, I have no idea.
Well, it took a minute, but you got to the point there in that last sentence.
I find it both hilarious that English is now the lingua franca of world commerce, and that that's the term for it in English. It's fitting, though, since I figure that the way English ~~ransacks~~ borrows from other languages is both a cause and effect of its success.
Funny how "lingua franca" doesn't mean French anymore. English is weird.
It sounds cool.
Now that is an acceptable answer.
If you don't speak Latin, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese or French.
Because if you do it mostly sounds like either Sunday mass or an English tourist trying to order a drink by reading from a guidebook.
Nobody speaks any of those languages. They just pretend to when the germanics are around so we think the roman empire is still strong.
Okay, well, if you're just gonna tell everybody we have to cut you out of the mailing list now.
Well that's just the thing though. People (allegedly) used to do loads of magic, now they dont. Makes sense the spells and rituals would be in the language of the time.
Also lots of the books and grimoires we still have access to are in Latin or translated from Latin. So there's a connection there too.
Wait, are these last couple of comments supposed to be in-universe or in real life? Because it's confusing either way.
In many cases you don't need an obscure language to do magic. Latin is merely the language in which the sorcery books were written. And they were written because it was the language of the scholars, which magic practitioners pretended to be.
It's not a peeve, it's a goat.
Fuck you.
Love,
Black Phillip
haha
I mean... we've just met, buy me a drink first?
Genuinely don't know where this is coming from.
Oh, hey, I Googled it. It's a goat thing. Still don't get it because I haven't seen the thing. But yeah, okay. Goat.
harry potter in today's world: "electro petroleum!"
Maybe the revival in a few centuries will try to do the same with English-sounding fake words because in the future they sound magical, too.
"Flyare alting!"
Alastair Crowley? Gardener? Eta: The Catholic Church?
Weren't both of those people English?
Do English people think the Catholic Church is magic? I know they sometimes wear dresses, but their hats are round, not pointy. Completely different thing.
And yeah, they say they are turning wafers into human flesh, but I've had the wafers and trust me, they don't taste like chicken at all.
@MudMan
I think this is an interesting topic
This comment from an old Reddit post seems to contain some knowledge, imo
https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/1SHtAFS093
As noted in that comment, in reading Goethe’s Faust I remember distinctly that line, ERITUS SICUT DEUS, SCIENTES BONUM ET MALUM.
Something about its oldness, religiosity and simplicity make it magical to me
Sure. I guess what I'm saying is that perception is fundamentally anglocentric.
Obviously, by being retained as a liturgical language romance language speakers associate it as much to demonology as they do to... you know, your cousin getting married or a nerdy college student having obnoxious debates at the pub.
I'm also saying that it sounds dumb to me. Just culturally it immediately flags somebody copying their homework or resorting to things that sound fancy to them when they're not.
My grandma was a matron and used tricks like those when I was a kid.
You guys keep giving me anecdotes about how the anglosphere mistook common latinsphere practices for mystical ancient spells as a response to my post about how the anglosphere mistakes common latinsphere practices for mystical ancient spells.
I get how it would have become fancy-sounding shorthand to them, I'm saying that using it as pop-culture shorthand for mysticism feels ethnocentric and silly to me.
Actually, Europe wouldn’t have stopped exploding to this very day.
It would have gone from constant explosions every day with particularly intense bouts of Sunday explosions to a school or university exploding every couple of weeks.
The Vatican would be a smoldering crater basically all the time, though.
I mean, the original Catholic texts weren't even written in Latin.
I want to know how much anger and moaning was felt among demons when they got the memo that they were supposed to switch languages now.
"But my entire summoning circle is already engraved in Hebrew! Can we at least do Greek or Aramaic? I already have prints in those!"
"It's not even the same alphabet! I have to transliterate all my curses now?"
Well, at least abracadabra is Hebrew... In English it's "i create that which I speak".