this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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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'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.
"Latin is the lingua franca" is a hilarious phrase
Funny how "lingua franca" doesn't mean French anymore. English is weird.
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.
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.