Or, “We have a new car with automatic transmission and tinted windows from Honest Bob’s Car Dealership bought”?
This is in universe info, and obviously it is probably a retcon but…
The Star Wars movies have since ANH used real world accents and speech quirks, it only becomes noticeable really during the prequel trilogy and the Clone Wars show. In ANH it was just because Lucas was using British actors, but in the prequels and show it was intentional not a budget or real world issue.
Yoda speaks that way because Basic/English isn’t his first language
Yes, that’s the correct word order. However, with such an extremely long sentence it would also be acceptable to say “We have a new car bought with automatic transmission and tinted windows from Honest Bob’s Car Dealership.” to make the structure more clear (and to not get confused about the verb yourself).
Reverse Polish notation, Yoda’s species uses.
As a literary device, it’s called hyperbaton, “the use, especially for emphasis, of a word order other than the expected or usual one”.
As Yoda uses it constantly, I suppose it would be hyper-hyperbaton.
Yiddish type sentence construction (in English) will do this:
For you I should wait?
This, I like!
Etc.
Fascinating, this discourse is.
I’d say it’s the more specific form, anastrophe.
As others have said, because of the use of inflection, word order does not matter too much in Latin (except prepositions have to come before words or phrases they apply to etc), and I am not sure how much it applied to spoken Latin (evidence is a bit thin :)), but I do believe that in written Latin, at least, the verb normally came last. In Roman times, written Latin did not use punctuation, and the verb served as a useful way of marking that you had come to the end of a sentence. (IIRC, at an early stage in the development of written Latin they did not even put spaces between words, but I do not know if this practice lasted through the entire Roman period. I think punctuation is all post Roman, though.)
They did not have lowercase letters either, incidentally, so case was no help.
In some intelligent species, some elements of grammar might be hardwired, leading Yoda to speak that way when he’s more busy teaching than thinking about how to communicate. Of course, in the later movies, he’s younger, and also more often in very serious situations where he might want to think more closely about his syntax before speaking. While Yoda’s syntax in the first three movies might not actually be systematic enough for this to be true, I’ll allow a bit of suspension of disbelief on the technicalities, while believing in the concept.
There’s evidence that humans might have some hard-wired grammatical tendencies. For example, all well-studied creole languages encourage double negatives (like Spanish – once you go negative, you stay negative – unlike English, where each negative inverts the previous one). I believe there are other common elements among creoles supporting this hypothesis, but not nearly enough for a slam dunk.
No, I’m not calling Spanish a creole.
I think Yoda may be using topic-comment structure, rather than a straight grammatical word ordering. I will go look this up… I don’t have enough data yet.
Found the same thing suggested here:
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subject-verb-object-order.aspx See comments
*
I would argue that Yoda speaks with an underlying SVO grammar, the same as English. He differs from standard English in that his dialect is topic-prominent, rather than subject-prominent, as in standard English. Subject prominent languages tend to be quite strict in their word order, whereas in topic prominent languages, the main idea is shifted to the front of the sentence for emphasis. So, in the sentence “Han Solo digs Princes Leia”, the SUBJECT is ‘Han Solo’, (and should remain at the front of the sentence in subject-prominent SE), but the TOPIC is ‘Princes Leia’, which, in a topic-prominent rendering, would be “Princess Leia, Han Solo digs.”
As Bec noted (two comments below this one), Lucas based Yoda’s mode of speech on Hungarian. I’m not completely sure, but I think Hungarian is a topic-prominent SVO language*.
Where’s that Johanna?
Along those lines, I was going to say that Yoda speaks like somebody who is learning another language via immersion, rather than in a classroom. I’ve seen this many times amongst Mexican migrant workers who frequently know many English words, but are unschooled in English grammar (and, to be fair, the majority of English-speakers trying to speak Spanish are the same way). What happens is they compose their sentence in Spanish, and then substitute English, word for word. The result is English words with Spanish grammar.
This happens, of course, mostly amongst more recent immigrants. Those who live here longer do eventually learn the grammar to go with the words. Which brings us back to Yoda. The guy is 800 years old. He’s had plenty of time to learn to speak Basic* properly. He just refuses.
- I can’t remember - does the SW universe call the common tongue “Basic” or “Standard”?
Only 20 years younger, which isn’t much given his 800-year lifespan.
When Spanish speakers do that, they are applying topic-comment to their SVO base. Spanish is topic=prominent.
Yep. Basic is shortened from Galactic Basic. The alphabet being Aurebesh.
Nerd, I am.
See, “Nerd, I am” is not object-subject-verb. Anything can be fronted in topicalization; it’s not osv order here. It’s svo, topicalized.
This, and bosstone’s data supports it. It’s disconcerting how an amateur theory (OSV) can get so much play as to drown out an explanation that covers all data and that I believe would be supported by professional linguists.
I’m sure I’m going to get shit for that, but I never care.
<golf clap> Damn! You’re good!