Kontextmaschine

7th June 2023

Post reblogged from Maybe-Mathematical Musings with 167 notes

necarion:
The drafters of the Constitution were fluent in Greek and Latin. George Washington’s speeches read like they’re in fucking Latin, translated into English.
But you know what else feels like a Latin construction?
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
I wonder if this was entirely unambiguous to Madison because of how his brain parsed Latin grammar?
This had never occurred to me, but now that you mention it I can’t unsee it. The grammar looks so incredibly Latin.
The first half is an ablative absolute. The second half is a fucking gerundive. The sentence looks like it was translated from Latin, but as an exercise where you’re trying to prove you can read the Latin and so you’re not even trying to render it into idiomatic English. No wonder it’s confusing!
(This article makes the same observation, and argues that this implies the second amendment is only protecting militias; I don’t think the piece is quite right, though. It says the ablative absolute gives the “reason” for the following clause, but I think the Dickinson College link I gave, which is not trying to discuss politics, gives a better account: it’s the cause or circumstances of the following clause, which is much less specific. You can see this article arguing for the opposite conclusion and also name-checking the ablative absolute, but I think it’s a less persuasive case—even though I’m not really persuaded by the first one either.)
But yeah, no wonder the amendment seems weird. It is! It’s not really written in English.
—
But then I look at the rest of the Bill of Rights and I get basically the same vibes from all of it. It’s all super weird.
One thing I notice is how much of it is in the passive voice. The First Amendment is active (and not coincidentally probably the easiest to read and parse); the Sixth is formally active but has a lot of passive voice in it; and all the others are straight up passive voice. “No soldier shall…be quartered in any house”; “The right of the people to be secure in their persons…shall not be violated”; “Excessive bail shall not be required”; etc. You also get the sort of baroque nested clauses and running series of conjunctions that comes up a lot in Latin.
And something like the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
reads like a passage from Cicero, where he stacks up ten clauses in one sentence and you don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about until you get to the end.

Tagged: 'merica amhist