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.
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?”
Definitely a better pick, if you’re just gonna piggiback on a language. Still raises a ton of questions, though.
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.
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?
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.
Okay, well, if you’re just gonna tell everybody we have to cut you out of the mailing list now.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, are these last couple of comments supposed to be in-universe or in real life? Because it’s confusing either way.
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.
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.
I recently saw a local brand of chips with the tagline “less air, more chips”, and hey, there it is, capitalism at work. Competition happening.
Then I remembered that PepsiCo owns Frito-Lay and they are a huge conglomerate, so it doesn’t matter what it says on the bag. And hey, there it is, capitalism also.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
Pretty sure Jesus is a renewable power source. He does take three days to charge back up, though.
Well, it took a minute, but you got to the point there in that last sentence.