Forum:What's this?

I have just discovered something quite interesting... can Dumbledore speak Parselmouth?

In the Half-Blood Prince, chapter A Sluggish Memory, on the first memory Harry and Dumbledore study, Riddle is conversing with Morfin in Parseltongue (inferred as all their conversation is in italics). Right? So how come, a page later, Dumbledore is able to quote Morfin verbatim? " the big house over the way", as Dumbledore says, clearly a quote from Morfin, in the book it's in quotation marks too.

So how does this work? Is the moderately unlikely explanation of Dumbledore, having already extracted the memory directly from Morfin's mine, knowing every word in the conversation due to his exceptional Legilimency skills, viable? And how come Dumbledore never asks Harry to translate for him once, though in all the memories including Morfin or Marvolo Gaunt converse with each otehr in Parseltongue?

JW

83.193.199.202 16:07, 5 August 2009 (UTC)