this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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[–] MudMan@kbin.social 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (44 children)

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.

[–] Quik 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Actually, Europe wouldn’t have stopped exploding to this very day.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

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.

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