"}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\u2019t unsee it.\u00a0 The grammar looks so incredibly Latin.
The first half is an ablative absolute.\u00a0 The second half is a fucking gerundive.\u00a0 The sentence looks like it was translated from Latin, but as an exercise where you\u2019re trying to prove you can read the Latin and so you\u2019re not even trying to render it into idiomatic English.\u00a0 No wonder it\u2019s confusing!
(This article makes the same observation, and argues that this implies the second amendment is only protecting militias; I don\u2019t think the piece is quite right, though.\u00a0 It says the ablative absolute gives the\u00a0\u201creason\u201d 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\u2019s the cause\u00a0or circumstances\u00a0of the following clause, which is much less specific.\u00a0 You can see this article\u00a0arguing for the opposite conclusion and also name-checking the ablative absolute, but I think it\u2019s a less persuasive case\u2014even though I\u2019m not really persuaded by the first one either.)
But yeah, no wonder the amendment seems weird.\u00a0 It is!\u00a0 It\u2019s not really written in English.
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But then I look at the rest of the Bill of Rights and I get basically the same vibes from all of it.\u00a0 It\u2019s all super weird.
One thing I notice is how much of it is in the passive voice.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cNo soldier shall…be quartered in any house\u201d;\u00a0\u201cThe right of the people to be secure in their persons…shall not be violated\u201d;\u00a0\u201cExcessive bail shall not be required\u201d; etc.\u00a0 You also get the sort of baroque nested clauses and running series of conjunctions that comes up a lot in Latin.\u00a0\u00a0
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\u2019t know what the fuck he\u2019s talking about until you get to the end.\u00a0\u00a0