Rob and daughter Sarah atop the Leaning Tower, Pisa, Italy

Institute Research Director Dave Kopel has long urged me to do a broadcast production on the Constitution in the Latin language, and now it’s here!

Produced by II web monkey Justin Longo, the program features an interview of me by my daughter Sarah on the American Founding and the nature of the Constitution. Sarah, 23, is a classics major at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

I raised all three of my daughters to be bilingual: While they were growing up, my wife spoke exclusively to them in English while I spoke to them exclusively in Latin.

For linguistic wimps, the telecast includes subtitles in English. You can see the program here.

For linguistic jocks: Not even the Romans navigated all of Latin’s grammatical mistakes perfectly. See if you can identify the specific grammatical errors I made in the course of this interview. (Hint: On reviewing the video, I counted four.)

Finally: The pronunciation Sarah and I use is that of “Late Latin.” This is pretty much the same as classical Latin, except that the letter “V” is pronounced as in Italian or English.