Words, especially funny or old-fashioned words, is definitely part of the charm of JK Rowling's stories. From spells to practical jokes to candy to everyday slang, the words Rowling liberally sprinkles throughout her books delight us. While many of them are actual words that have fallen from general use and/or she has given new meanings to, this does not preclude us fan fiction authors the need to invent more words along the same line. And heck why just for fan fiction, do it for the book you've got squirreled away on that disk in the back of your computer desk that's looking for that extra touch.
(I intend by this summer to start a world-building workshop through the list. There's been some interest from the group with it. I thought we'd start with language and see if it goes well. If so, we'll decide as a group if we want to pursue other areas of creating a world, within JKR's, of course. I figured summer would be the best time, because things do tend to slow down just a bit for some of us. Don't feel you have to partcipate and if you can't every week, we totally understand! I have no room to talk after all!)
Okay first part of the language area is creating new words or finding words that are no longer used in modern everyday language. There are several excellent resources offline, key of which is the local library. There at the library are books by the dozen of every language on the planet. If you feel your word may have originated from a Japanese base but has been mangled through its travels to England or France, go to a Japanese-(Your Native Language) dictionary, find the word by it's translation from you're language to Japanese and then mangle it! Take out a vowel, replace a vowel with a different vowel. Heck, scramble around a consonant or two while you're at it. Give it a new look, maybe a slightly changed sound and voila! A new funky word for your spell, magical creature or candy bar!
Here are several other ways (using words that we are already familiar with):
1. Derivation - add prefixes or suffixes
teach + er= teacher
post + age = postage
re + fry = refry
happy + ness = happiness
2. Compounding - attach two words together (Note 3 possible spelling conventions in English)
icebox, Chinatown - no space between words
sit-in, blue-green - hyphenated
hot dog, White House, gas station, railroad train - spelled like two words, but pronounced as one.
3. Functional Shift - change the part of speech. eg. from Noun to Verb, etc
They were to-ing and fro-ing all night.
Don't you `hello-darling' me!
Just email me about that.
4. Acronym - make a word from the initial letters of a phrase
IU, UN - pronounced as the names of the letters
NATO, UNESCO - pronounced as though a spelled word
5. Coining - make up `from whole cloth'
Xerox, Kodak, nerd, Snoozles, hoochy-coochy
6. Blending - combine parts of two words
Amex = American Express
brunch = breakfast + lunch
petrinoid = petrified + paranoid
7. Back Formation - chop off an apparent suffix that isn't really a suffix
to laze = lazy
to vulch = vulture
Our own Chyna Rose has several other tips for us as well! Yay Rose!
"Best tip, have a definition before you go trying to make the word.
The first two words I ever invented, were created by accident. I was working with a massive crossover story that delt with characters jumping from reality to reality. I figured that someone going from universe to universe was doing some universal jumping, someone going from dimention to dimention dimentional jumping, time period to time period temporal... Enter realital jumping and an interrealital skiff. So one way is to find other words that mean roughly the same thing or have the same relationship as the word you need to invent."
(Wolfie actually likes the 'interrealital skiff' term...must use that somewhere...surely I can find something!)
She also said in an email to me:
"On a recent Harry Potter project entitled Hengeyokai (word invented by White Wolf's werewolf RPG and roughly translates to shapeshifters of the East) I needed a few words. I scraped a few Latin classification names for werebeasts. Homo canis and Cani homis were used to try to show the difference between the werewolves JKR came up with and the ones White Wolf did. That particular one came from combining the Latin name for humans with that for wolves (or at least dogs). The word I'm currently using is Batgaru, a combination of Baset and Garu (the offical White Wolf name for werecats and werewolves in general). I also combined parts of three seperate Japanese words to figure out the name of a 'wizarding school' that had to supposedly mysteriously blow up even though it never really existed. (Katakaiha: Kata - shape, kai - change, ha - school according to my source)."
This can be done, as I briefly mentioned above, with any language and it's funny that she and I used Japanese in our examples. o_0 Great minds think alike and so do ours. In one of my Star Wars stories, Code of the Warrior, I actually took a feudal/Shogunate period Japanese approach to the world I wanted my two main characters (besides Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon) from. There I used Japanese names, cultural concepts, terminology and then added a dab of fantasy and science fiction to meld it all together. Thus the planet Yomguri was born, ravaged by several generations of ineffectual emperors and on the brink of a coup d'etat against the current empress, a girl-child protected by her former Jedi/bodyguard who's family had served the Empresses family for generations. I created a society dictated by codes of honor, distinct class systems, and mysteries of a very ancient culture that had a bit of ancient technology/magic. I used actual Japanese terms for warrior honor (bushido and its tenets), as well as naming conventions for weapons (katana, wakizashi), occupations (ninjitsu, yojimbo) etc. With the right feel, words true to their origins and usage work excellently in any setting.
The fun in JK Rowling's world is that you have both a made-up world that's so drastically different from our own, but not so much that we cannot identify with it, and the world that we live in today. When Harry gets off the Hogwart's Express at Platform 9 3/4, we know that he can go home and watch television, listen to the radio, have access to computer technology, walk to the local library and get the latest novel by Stephen King or Danielle Steel to read and wander around flipping on light switches powered by electricity (all assuming the Durselys let him do so *grin*). All of these are luxurious conveniences of the technological world that he does not have access to while emmersed in the world of magic. It's been a long standing idea that magic and technology negate each other. I'm not saying it's unusual to read a book where a magician is from a technically advanced society but the idea that magic and technology cannot, or should not, mix together is almost historically substantiated. History shows that as we humans technologically progressed, our superstitions and beliefs in the mystical and supernatural tempered little by little. While there are those of us that whole-heartedly believe in magic, Merlin is not someone we'd expect to see wandering around the lit streets of New York City or London (why that is I don't know, that'd actually be an interesting story). We tend to view magic as old-fashioned, out-of-date, and perhaps impractically slow in our fast paced world. You have to wait for the herbs to grow in your backyard because it's more potent than buying processed or dried herbs in the store and another dozen reasons we can think up to excuse the fact that magic is time-consuming. Professor Snape has Professor Sprout growing what he needs for his potions in the greenhouse just a few steps from the castle or another short distance away is the Forbidden Forest where he can gather some ingredients. If not, Floo powder in the fireplace and poof! Diagon Alley and it's line of really cool shops that I could spend several hundred galleons in. He doesn't have to worry about the constant pressure of "Can I get this done before my TV program comes on at six?" because Snape's world doesn't have television. (We won't go into the whys of that) Plus he's been raised and lives daily in a world that's slower in pace than ours.
Working with JKR's world, realizing the technical capacity of it will go a long way in creating words to match:
1) It's an old-fashioned feeling world, so finding out-of-date and no longer used words is excellent. It keeps in the spirit of what JKR has produced.
2) With her magical creatures JKR has used actual mythical and mystical creatures, both as legends/myths say and with her own twists. And a few she's probably made up, hard to tell unless you're an expert in that sort of thing (do red caps exist? I've never found out).
3) Herbs seem to be reinvented with a fun twist. Mandrake root are human baby-looking beings at the root of the plant with a deadly wail that can be blocked with proper ear muffsn in JKR's world. Mandrake root is actually a real plant but JKR took the actual plant and gave it a new and fantastical look (for more info on the mandrake in old-time terms, go here http://shanmonster.lilsproutz.com/witch/plants/mandrake.html. Do the same with something like fox glove or cat grass (oat grass). What would the JKR's version of blue grass or buffalo grass be, for example? Is sage just a plant or is something more (besides the name of my kitty)
In the meantime, whilst you ponder these and other technically confusing questions (grin) here are some websites that might be of interest!
Online English to Japanese to English Dictionary - They also cover Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, and Swedish.
Dictionary.com - This is where I get many of my word definitions. They have some really strange ones, plus another translator, synonym, thesaurus, and more for our wordy pleasure.
Wordorigins.org - An excellent word origins page.
Research on Forgotten English Words - a few words of amusing origins and definitions. I also highly recommend the book and desktop calendars by Jeffrey Kacirk called Forgotten English. Very excellent as a resource and a fun, interesting read!
Scrolling through a thesaurus, a dictionary, or just another book can give you a wealth of words to work with. Many of JKR's spell words have a Latin base to it, if not actual Latin itself. Use one of the multitude of online Latin dictionaries to look up the base definition and then misspell it or change it in some fashion or form to make an incantation. Example: I was looking for a word to describe a spell that white flame from the wand tip, but the flame does not burn, it encases the victim or object in ice (without detrimental affect in the short term). Glacies means ice or glacialis means icy or frozen. Flamma means flame or fire, but interestingly, flamen means breeze, holy spirit or wind. Inflammo means to set on fire or kindle. Peruro perussi perustum means to burn up, consume in flame, gull or chafe. Considering what I would want the spell for (defense and perhaps as a trap), I could create two different spells of a similar intent from the same Latin base. Okay, so I know I want the spell to involve ice but not a noun-derivative so glacies wouldn't work, but glacialis would. Now instead of one spell I could actually have two, giving them different properties of some sort. Let's say Glacialus Flameni will create a light coating of ice over the target through a icy wind shooting from the wand tip, temporarily keeping them in a cold stasis but without any short term harm (other than being really cold). Glacialus Inflammo however is a deadly spell, damaging the target in a painful if not lethal way, encasing them in a huge chunk of cold flame. Two spells of similar background and properties but with two very different uses, results and whatnot. I didn't like the sound or look of the other Latin words I found for ice and flame so I dumped them. Plus I changed the spelling of glacialis to glacialus and flamen to flameni to make it more magicky and besides, it sounds better when sounded out to me. Latin translations, especially in Medieval times, had a bad habit of being either misspelled constantly or the scribes/writers would just make up a Latin word for a common layman word in their common tongue, adding -us or something at the end to make it sound/look Latin-like, so why can't we do the same?
There you have it! A brief (this was brief?!), hopefully informative method in quickly and painlessly creating a word or group of words for spells, creatures and other magical things for your Harry Potter, or heck any fictional, arena.
Next week? Working with an entire new language (dum dum dum!) Question: am I insane, crazy, or just need psychiatric help? The Answer? Yes.