Question:

What other language was the United States Constitution originally written in?

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I know that the one we see and hear about is written in English, but when I went to shadow a girl at Yale (my high school sends prospects to shadow graduates at prominent universities) the professor asked this question, and stumped everyone in the room. This was the first time all day that I or the person I was shadowing had been stumped, and neither of us have been able to find the answer since then.

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6 ANSWERS


  1. english, thats it


  2. have u considered that the answer is "none"?

  3. It was originally written in one language.  That's all anything is originally written in, unless the writer is writing with both hands and using a different language with each. It was probably translated info French right away, though.

    There were certainly influential works in other languages that influenced the Constitution.  In those works, perhaps the most prevalent of languages other than English is French.

    "Immediately after the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the thirteen former British colonies began writing a new series of constitutions. Fifteen were published between 1776 and 1787, six of the most significant in 1776. These included the constitutions of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Both of these documents created interest abroad and were being translated into other languages-notably French-within weeks of their being made public. Other copies, whether in English, French, or in another language, were soon in the hands of scholars from Poland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Spain, as well as from Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil.

    Upon the signing of the alliance between France and the United States in 1778, these state constitutional texts, by then known as the Code de la Nature, were published in Paris. In 1783, the American minister in Paris, Benjamin Franklin, obtained from the French minister for foreign affairs official authorization for a Paris printing of Constitutions des Treize Etats de l'Amerique. In 1786, a year before the drafting of the American Constitution, French philosopher and mathematician, the Marquis de Condorcet, outlining his ideas for a French declaration of rights, authored a study of the role of American political ideas entitled De l'influence de la Revolution d'Amerique sur l'opinion et la legislation de l'Europe." -- http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itdhr/0...

  4. Latin is the most likely,

    but it might well have been copied  into French or Spanish, to send to those countries in Europe.

    possibly related to the original question - maybe 60 percent of the words in the Constitution are Latin Derivatives.

  5. It was written in English./

  6. Trick question.  The constitution contains the phrase "pro tempore" which is strictly Latin and not English.  The entire document was not produced in an alternative language, but small pieces were written in something other than English

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