A long time ago in a galaxy far far away there was a republic, which became an empire, which was then overthrown by revolution. Somehow a documentary of these events has made it here, with the galactic standard language translated into English for our benefit. The editor of this documentary clearly wishes us to see Yoda as the wisest and most intelligent person involved, and yet he seems to be unable to grasp the very simple rules of grammar for this language. Something everybody else who speaks the galactic standard language has no problem with. In this galaxy at this time that would mark someone as a bit of an idiot.
Is there a canonical reason why they, (Lucusfilm etc.), decided to have Yoda talk like an imbecile?
Second language English is.
To me he talks like someone who has a different first language – one with different grammatical structures that he imports into Galactic Standard language. That’s not the mark of an idiot, just of someone who is not fluent in a language that they did not learn as a child.
Imagine someone 900 years old on Earth speaking English as he learned it as a kid. How would that sound to us?
Maybe Yoda is using proper grammar…from a certain point of view.
“If he’s so smart, how come Professor Einstein talks so funny?”
But if he’s had 900 years to practice the language, you’d think he’d be a little better at it than that. I mean, if I had even 40 years to practice French (the language I studied in college and high school), I bet I’d get pretty good at it. I’d still have an accent, probably, but I don’t think the grammar would trip me up that much.
Maybe Yoda’s species[sup]*[/sup] brains are wired in a way that makes their speech patterns different to most species.
[sup]*[/sup][sub]What is Yoda’s species anyway?[/sub]
He’s a Mu’PPet.
We don’t know how long he’s been speaking Human, do we? I saw the first movie of the prequel trilogy, and decided not to see the other two.
And why should Yoda try to use standard Human grammar? He seems to be able to communicate just fine, and if other people have to ponder his words for a second to understand him, his apparent wisdom increases.
My grandfather came to the US as either a teen or a man in his early twenties. As a man in his sixties or seventies, he still had a VERY pronounced Italian accent, and still occasionally used Italian grammar. He also still used Italian words on occasion. However, he lived in a neighborhood that had a lot of people who were either Italian immigrants or kids of such people, so most of them understood him.
I always thought Yoda realized that people listened to him better when speak funny he did.
Are you sure you’re saying what you mean to say? Yoda’s speech reflects perfectly correct English grammar, for the most part.
Messing with us, he is.
This is something that gets overlooked a lot. Yoda in ESB actually uses perfectly correct if slightly archaic grammar, and only rarely uses the OSV sentence construction. When he does, it makes sense and is something a native English speaker might say, though again it would have a slightly archaic feel to it. It’s not that Yoda learned English and then applied his own language’s rules to it, it’s that he learned English in the equivalent of the 1500s and that’s what stuck. Yoda’s speech quite frankly flows beautifully in ESB, and is one of the things that made the movie so atmospheric and genuinely good.
But for the prequels Lucas apparently decided he wasn’t going to review the original movies for consistency at all, and the only thing he remembered about Yoda was “wise, old, talks funny.” Yoda in the prequels is like a particularly inept fan’s interpretation of the character.
I mean, seriously. The line is “That is why you fail.” In the prequels, it would have been “Why you fail, that is.” That’s just sloppy.
Slight hijack - I heard on the radio yesterday you can now get a GPS for your car with Yoda’s voice giving directions! (“In 300 feet, left you will turn.”)
If that’s not enough, you can also have Darth Vader on your GPS. (I command you to turn left!")
eta: found the story!
It’s different in one significant way (or, as Yoda would say, “Different in one significant way it is.”): the normal word order in an English sentence is SVO (subject-verb-object), while Yoda use OSV (object-subject-verb). While SVO is the most common pattern in languages on Earth, it’s not the only pattern: for example, Japanese and Latin (two completely unrelated languages) are SOV languages (“Tu stultus es” or “Kimi baka desu” for “You are stupid”, where “es” and “desu” are the verbs coming at the end). However, OSV languages are rare on Earth.
“Different in one significant way it is” is perfectly correct English, grammatically speaking.
Right you are: correct it is, but odd it sounds.
But English is capable of making sense in it. “My ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.” That isn’t some weird alien construction, that’s just poetic English.
And Yoda actually doesn’t use OSV very much at all in the link I provided. Sometimes it’s standard SVO, sometimes it’s OVS (“Luminous beings are we”), and sometimes it’s OSV. But English speakers are perfectly capable of constructing all those sentences; just again it’s a slightly archaic/formal/poetic style.
…Then you get the prequels.
That’s not poetic, that’s just stilted and forced and ugly, blindly following a single Yoda Rule that doesn’t even match the original movie.
“Calculate again, I will.”
I assume it’s the same reason that Han Solo can understand Chewy when all we hear are growls. It’s a big universe full of diverse characters with different languages and different species quirks.