English is my wife’s sixth language. She is fluent, however at times she orders her words in strange ways and I have to correct her. But, I fear, that I may have subliminally picked up some of her speech patterns. I hope not. I also spent decades in India and I wonder how much Indian English has affected my speech. I do know that people from my home town have asked me, “where are you from?” because they perceived an accent.
2 Likes
According to that Atlantic article I previously linked to:
“This is a clever device for making him seem very alien,” said Geoff Pullum, a professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. “You have to do some work to realize that his, ‘Much to learn, you still have,’ means ‘You still have much to learn.’” There are other fictional examples of characters who speak like Yoda. Bowyer, from the 1996 Super Nintendo game, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, says things like, “Fun this is, yes?” and “Disturb me, you must not! Practicing I am.” But what about in the real world? “Surprisingly, there are a very few languages—it seems to be in single digits—that use OSV as their basic or normal order,” Pullum told me. “As far as I know, they occur only in the area of Amazonia in Brazil: they are South American Indian languages. One well-described case is a language called Nadëb.”
1 Like
It’s kind of interesting how the brain still manages to make sense of it all, not only when rearrngng th wrd rdr, bt lso whn y prgrssvl rmv mr nd mr chrctrs ntl nthng s lft…
4 Likes
I remember my mom commenting on it back when ESB first came out. She said Yoda reminded her of how some of her classmates’ parents talked when she was in grade school in Johnstown, PA. But, her grade-school memories were also from the early 1940s, so…
Maybe their physiognomy affected this memory.
Yoda klingt auf Deutsch exakt genauso falsch wie auf Englisch.
ADD: Actually, there are some possible S-O-V sentences that are perfectly fine in German, but sound rather Yodaesque in English:
“Hast du meine Katze erschossen?”
(“Did you my cat shoot?”)
Actually, SOV languages are fairly common; it’s OSV languages that are rare.
I know, but if you’re used to SOV, both sound “foreign” in a similar way.
With a definite article, it would be more sensible, but odd.
“A woman without, her man would be a savage.”
as in the woman is elsewhere, not within.
A stretch, I know.
That is what the article says:
“Surprisingly, there are a very few languages—it seems to be in single digits—that use OSV as their basic or normal order,”
Less than 10 languages are OSV.
This is funny because Japanese – the native language of Nintendo, if not Bowyer – is an SOV language. 楽しいですね、literally “fun is yes,” is a completely normal sentence in Japanese.