Abominable Conclusion 1: the AIs that first negotiated with humanity, thousands of years ago, to levitate objects on command, had insisted that humans speak the protocol words… Wingardium Leviosa.
Except that said humans won’t develop the language where those not-words sound kind-of-sensible for a few more thousand years. And even then, most of the people in the world wouldn’t get the joke. (Do French wizards cast French spells? What about the Chinese?)
Excellent point, I’d forgotten about that. Ma-ha-su.
Since Eliezer does nothing accidentally, this is very strong evidence that wizards invent spells with words related to the language they speak, and that spells then have a high turnover rate that doesn’t let them survive longer than their languages.
Abominable Conclusion 1: the AIs that first negotiated with humanity, thousands of years ago, to levitate objects on command, had insisted that humans speak the protocol words… Wingardium Leviosa.
AI-1: And so we have decided to grant the humans great powers
AI-2: but when we bestow our awesome power upon the puny humans they may become arrogant and forget that they are small and ridiculous
AI-1: we’ve thought of that, and have a solution...
Wingardium Leviosa!
Except that said humans won’t develop the language where those not-words sound kind-of-sensible for a few more thousand years. And even then, most of the people in the world wouldn’t get the joke. (Do French wizards cast French spells? What about the Chinese?)
Probably. Quirrell teaches at least one spell which is clearly neither of English nor Latin origin.
Excellent point, I’d forgotten about that. Ma-ha-su.
Since Eliezer does nothing accidentally, this is very strong evidence that wizards invent spells with words related to the language they speak, and that spells then have a high turnover rate that doesn’t let them survive longer than their languages.
LOL—perhaps a chief objective of the Ministry of Magic is to conceive and require obfuscating interfaces to magic! That would explain a lot!
Parallels to real-world high-school and/or undergraduate mathematical education … are left as an exercise. :)