Science-fictional Future Earth United Earth Constitution

[bradrn]

If we write a constitution in a specific dialect of a specific language, eventually the meaning of words and grammatical structures will shift. Look at a phrase like "all men are created equal," and imagine the chaos if it were legally enforcible. Sooner or later, the language of the constitution has to become a diglossic "legalese" understood only by experts, and finally a dead language where most people just have to have faith that their lawyer hasn't incorrectly translated a word. Imagine a future in which English develops evidentiality, or completely reorganizes its pronoun system, such that the apparent text of the law appears to say something the lawyers insist it does not. At that point the constitution would be a minefield for fuzzy interpretation and ambiguity, and the pressure to rewrite it would be immense.

Didn’t Britain use a derivative of Norman French for several centuries?

[Moose-tache]

Didn’t Britain use a derivative of Norman French for several centuries?

Britain does not have a written constitution. There is no time limit on statutory law and case law, because it is constantly being updated. I'm specifically asking about a constitution written with meticulous legal interpretation in mind, in the vernacular, i.e. written with its meaning determined by ordinary use. To my mind, this is very different from something written in "Law French" or some other non-living language that exists only to write those documents.

[hwhatting]

So what do you think? How long can a written consitution last, linguisticaly?

That would depend on a) the rate of linguistic change, and b) on how much the literary variety it's written in is kept in everyday use. For a), if I look at stuff written 200-300 years ago in the European languages I know, I can generally read it without too many problemes, and books from that period tend still to be relatively widely read. 500 years already is a bit of a slog, with many unusual words and shifted meanings, and for 800-1000 years it basically becomes a different language, where you can get the gist, but would need a dictionary and maybe also some grammar primer for the detailed understanding that you'd need in a legal context. Of course, language change may be faster or slower, and then there can be cultural disruptions, like the Norman conquest, where a lot of terms and cultural vocabulary change in a relatively short time.
But that all goes out of the window with b) - if that particulary variety is still widely taught and used, you will have speakers who are sufficiently at home in that language to do legal acrobatics in it. That was the case, as you mentioned, with Latin throughout the Middle Ages and into Early Modernity, and is the case with Modern Standard Arabic, which is basically Classic Arabic with modern vocabulary. Or Sanscrit in India. In these cases, you had / have a professional class that feels totally at home in the literary language, and the masses who need those professionals to interpret the texts for them. But if you teach that historical dialect widely enough, which should be possible with a good, modern educational system, the vast majority would have direct access to the text. This would be similar to what is said about Iceland, where the language of the sagas is supposed to be widely read and understood - helped, seemingly, by the fact that the orthography of Modern Icelandic is very conservative, so that people are not aware of the differences in pronunciation. That's, of course not unusual - it's like people reading Shakespeare, using their contemporary pronunciation of English.

[Ares Land]

By the late Roman Republic, the Law of the Twelve Tables was held in great reverence but held only symbolic value, no one really understood it anymore. But nobody had bothered documenting Old Latin, plus the text was damaged, so that gives us a lower bound of about four centuries in the worst case scenario.
As an upper bound, let's look at the Quran. The Quran is still used as a source of low, despite dating back to the 7th century. Quranic Arabic is well documented, there's a lot of commentary and I don't think there's really any serious dispute as to what the text means.
Quranic scholars are I think justifiably confident in saying they can keep at it indefinitely.

If any constitution is going to last indefinitely, I think it'd the US constitution, due to the cultural attitudes towards the text, the general reverence and the reluctance to alter it. The US could keep going for millennia with the same text, at least linguistically. English will change of course, but Modern English is extremely well documented, there's plenty of contemporary texts, dictionaries and reference grammar, plus the sheer mass of commentary on the Constitution itself. Your average 43rd century American won't understand the text, but I don't think there'll be any serious discussions as to the literal meaning. (Assuming Earth doesn't turn into a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the meantime.)

Of course while you can use a dead language for all your laws for as long as you want, maybe you don't want to. If the idea is to keep the constitution readable by the average citizen, then I'd say two to four centuries.

[Raphael]

NOTE: I have now incorporated this constitution into this scenario:

https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1335

So please post any further comments you might have there.

[vegfarandi]

What's the mechanism for supraregional organization. For example, who manages rail infrastructure across the continent of Africa? It feels as though there would be utility in creating explicit regional bodies for effective administration and construction of large-scale inter-provincial infrastructure and other kinds of cooperation. Or is the answer simply that those can be created ad hoc but have no constitutional angle?

[Raphael]

Or is the answer simply that those can be created ad hoc but have no constitutional angle?

Yes, basically. Partly joined institutions of local governmental units, partly regional subdivisions of global departments.