Hypothesis: original (probably Latin) incantations were aliased to “Wingardium Leviosa” and similar because it was easier for Hogwarts students to learn.
Evidence:
Powerful wizards still use some Latin spells. Perhaps only up to 7h year magic was aliased?
We did not see any non-English wizards cast spells yet. It’s likely (and fits into the setting) there are other syntaxes.
Due to the Interdict of Merlin, it’s possible the Latin alternatives are lost.
The aliasing could be common knowledge among wizards, but not muggleborns. That could explain Hermione not saying anything when Harry snaps at the silliness of it. Still, Draco doesn’t mention it when discussing if early wizards were more powerful.
Do readers get to see non-English speakers cast spells in canon?
Last night Damian Conway talked about Lingua-Romana-Perligata as part of his “Fun with Dead Languages” talk. He makes the point that Latin’s suffixes don’t constrain the word order. Given Harry’s dream of destroying Azkaban and Dumbledore in Ch 79 muttering strange incantations that sounded not quite like Latin and echoed in their ears in an unusually creepy fashion, maybe Latin provides a larger space to search for a mnemonic phrase that the Source of Magic will match and action, than languages with a more constrained grammar.
Given Harry’s experiments with his Bag of Holding at the beginning of the story, it seems that magic recognizes the meanings of words irrespective of whether the speakers actually know what they mean, and it doesn’t have to be any particular language. I suspect that the spells mostly sounded meaningful to people of various languages throughout history the way “wingardium leviosa” sounds like a levitatey sort of spell to an English speaker.
Hypothesis: original (probably Latin) incantations were aliased to “Wingardium Leviosa” and similar because it was easier for Hogwarts students to learn.
Evidence:
Powerful wizards still use some Latin spells. Perhaps only up to 7h year magic was aliased?
We did not see any non-English wizards cast spells yet. It’s likely (and fits into the setting) there are other syntaxes.
Due to the Interdict of Merlin, it’s possible the Latin alternatives are lost.
The aliasing could be common knowledge among wizards, but not muggleborns. That could explain Hermione not saying anything when Harry snaps at the silliness of it. Still, Draco doesn’t mention it when discussing if early wizards were more powerful.
Do readers get to see non-English speakers cast spells in canon?
Last night Damian Conway talked about Lingua-Romana-Perligata as part of his “Fun with Dead Languages” talk. He makes the point that Latin’s suffixes don’t constrain the word order. Given Harry’s dream of destroying Azkaban and Dumbledore in Ch 79 muttering strange incantations that sounded not quite like Latin and echoed in their ears in an unusually creepy fashion, maybe Latin provides a larger space to search for a mnemonic phrase that the Source of Magic will match and action, than languages with a more constrained grammar.
There’s also
Not to mention the Sumerian Simple Strike Hex. Mahasu doesn’t sound much like Latin.
I believe it’s meant to be Sumerian
Do we know if the consonants matter, or is just the ratio of vowel sounds?
Presumably that was one of the ideas that Harry checked with Hermione in the beginning of the fic.
Yes, I’m sure they know. Do we know?
Oh, I see. Not that I recall and not that a(n admittedly cursory) search of the book turned up.
Given Harry’s experiments with his Bag of Holding at the beginning of the story, it seems that magic recognizes the meanings of words irrespective of whether the speakers actually know what they mean, and it doesn’t have to be any particular language. I suspect that the spells mostly sounded meaningful to people of various languages throughout history the way “wingardium leviosa” sounds like a levitatey sort of spell to an English speaker.