Magic and language in fantasy fiction

[simont]

Since I've been musing about fiction recently, here's another thought that crossed my mind.

Fantasy fiction often has a magic system involving spells cast in spoken language. But what language? Why does that language work and not another? Or would another language work? Would it depend on the spell? On the caster? On the location? It seems to me

Comments

[atreic]

This post reminds me of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, particularly the start of chapter 6 and the bit in chapter 25 :-)

http://hpmor.com/chapter/6
http://hpmor.com/chapter/25

[simont]

It's hard to be sure, but I think this entire pondering might well have originated in my head (some years ago) from HP's bad Latin; one of the first questions, if not the first, that made me start thinking in this direction was wondering whether I could possibly justify the bad Latin by an in-universe explanation rather than 'Rowling got it wrong'.

(On which subject I also have to give a shout out to ho for hoggwarts!, for its perfect fusion of the HP spell schema with Molesworth. "But surely sir lumos hav a greek nom. ending whereas the root come from lat. lumen luminis a lite as any fule kno?")

I see that chapter 25 suggests some counterarguments, but then, its version of the concept is more mechanistic than mine was anyway...

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah, I was thinking of HPMOR. After some frantic re-googling, there's some more detail on language specifically in http://hpmor.com/chapter/22... )

[naath]

In Seanan McGuire's October Daye books it is explicitly stated that it is the intent rather than the words that matter; doesn't seem to be the case that the words have to mean the thing you intend although the same people seem to use the same words for the same things a lot.

[cartesiandaemon]

I can't easily think of more, though I can think of some variants or combinations of two options

[simont]

there WAS a language of magic, and various ancient languages are a corruption of it

This would be particularly amusing in the Potterverse for the implication that the bad Latin grammar in the spell incantations is actually right, and the thing we think of as 'correct Latin' is the wrong, corrupted, half-arsed version!

(And, just as when I half-remember a tune my brain will make up a plausible version of the missing parts that then turns out not to match the original, the Romans constructed a basically consistent grammar around their corrupted bits and pieces of spell-speech, it just wasn't the same as the one they were trying to recall.)

[cartesiandaemon]

Following on from my other two comments, I don't think it's completely arbitrary, I think the way it works often follows some vague guidelines people have absorbed subconsciously. That is, I think most of the time, books succeed in subtly conveying what is possible and what isn't (and which things, if the protagonist poked at, would reveal the holes in the worldbuilding

[cartesiandaemon]

Oops, this is spilling into _another_ comment. But taking my description of how it appears to work in HPMOR, that's... not completely inconsistent with how some tech works