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.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bouh@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, that depends on your magic I guess. I'm not the one to say merely speaking Latin would summon demons.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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.