Verbal components: who is the mage talking to?

[Slife]

I've always liked Zelazny's explanation. Warning, long quote.

I spent the
next hour or so considering the nature of a being capable of moving into a
person and taking over the controls. There seemed only a certain number of
ways it might be done, and I narrowed the field quickly, considering what I
knew of her nature, by means of the technical exercises my uncle had taught
me. When I thought I had it worked out I backtracked and mused over the
forces that would have to be involved.
From the forces I worked my way through the tonic vibrations of their
aspects. The use of raw power, while flashy, is wasteful and very fatiguing
for the operator, not to mention aesthetically barbaric. Better to be
prepared.
I lined up the spoken signatures and edited them into a spell. Suhuy
would probably have gotten it down even shorter, but there is a point of
diminishing returns on these things, and I had mine figured to where it
should work if my main guesses were correct. So I collated it and assembled
it. It was fairly long-too long to rattle off in its entirety if I were in
the hurry I probably would be. Studying it, I saw that three linchpins would
probably hold it, though four would be better.
I summoned the Logrus and extended my tongue into its moving pattern.
Then I spoke the spell, slowly and clearly, leaving out the four key words I
had chosen to omit. The woods grew absolutely still about me as the words
rang out. The spell hung before me like a crippled butterfly of sound and
color, trapped within the synesthetic web of my personal vision of the
Logrus, to come again when I summoned it, to be released when I uttered the
four omitted words.

 

[Piratecat]

Well, given its 2 seconds or so, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the verbal componment for all spells is the same and along the lines..

"I'm buggered if this fails..."

You? You're funny, you are.

 

[Umbran]

I was just recently reading a book by Jim Butcher (Fool Moon, second book in "The Dresden Files" series), that had an interesting take on it.

The main character is effectively an arcane spellcaster. He notes that the more closely the magic is connected to the caster, the harder it is on the caster. You can cast magic with no words at all, but then there's nothing between the mage's mind and the magic, and it burns. If you frame it in words, you get a sort of buffered channel through your mind. If the words are in your native tongue, it is still pretty darned connected to you, and you can still get burned. So, mages tend to use nigh-forgotten, ill-understood languages to frame their magics.

 

[The Grackle]

When wizards (or other classes) cast a spell with verbal components, who are they "talking" to?

Sandestans and madlings.

 

[taliesin15]

I believe the root of the word incantation is incatare, which roughly means to give force by speech--literary critic Hugh Kenner has this great essay Magics and Spells about the magical and bardic forerunners of modern literature--in fact, he suggests there are strong links between the Bard's craft and magic itself. Because of these ideas I've been toying with the idea of making all spellcasters sub-classes of Bards.