Master Yoda. Photo: Star Wars, Episode 1 The new Star Wars is out, and if you’re one of the bazillions of people who has seen it already, don’t tell me how it ends. I haven’t seen it yet. Though I have seen plenty of trailers featuring the cute rolling robot, BB-8. My best guess is that, in an homage to episode 5, it will be revealed that Luke Skywalker is actually BB-8 ‘s father.
But, since I have yet to immerse myself in the new, wildly successful world of Star Wars 7, I will nonetheless take this opportunity to make a few observations about one of the most beloved characters from Star Wars 1-6: Yoda. In the prequel trilogy (1-3) Yoda was a powerful public figure, in charge of the Jedi Council that maintained order within the galactic republic. In Star Wars 4-6, during the rule of the sinister Evil Empire, Yoda was relegated to the nasty, foul-smelling swamp planet of Dagobah, where he nevertheless managed to coach Luke Skywalker in the ways of the Jedi, enabling him to take down the emperor (with a little help from papa Vader) and banish the Sith from the galaxy for good – or at least until the beginning of Episode 7. At no point during his nearly 1000 year long life was Yoda ever a language teacher. And yet, his oddly formed sentences have an important lesson for language learners everywhere. As anyone who has watched any of the original Star Wars movies can attest, Yoda has a characteristically weird way of speaking. “Use the force, you will.” “Many dangers ahead, there are.” “Wars not make a Jedi great.” For copy editors, style guide writers, and other grammar Nazis who work exclusively in English, these sentences are a nightmare. But for those of use who work in more than one language, it points out an important truth about languages: that the order in which verbs are given isn’t that important. For linguists analyzing languages, one of the most important aspect of analysis is the order that the three most important elements of any languages: subjects, verbs, and objects, are given. This sounds hopelessly complex. But just sit back and let Yoda explain it for you. Take a classic Yodaism: “A Jedi, you will be.” Now, how would you say that in regular English? “You will be a Jedi”. Now let’s break this sentence down into 3 key parts: “You”, “will be”, and “a Jedi”. Okay now, what is it that these three blocks are doing? Let’s start with the first part: “You”. Pretty basic, right? “you” is a concrete thing, a noun, but more importantly, it is the central focus of the sentence. Linguist would refer to this as the “subject”. Now, the second part: “will be”. It’s not a physical thing, but an action. As you may already know, this is also known as a verb. Finally, the final part of the sentence: “a Jedi”. This is also a noun, i.e. a concrete thing. But unlike the first part of the sentence, it doesn’t stand alone. In the context of the sentence, “a Jedi” is dependent on “You”. It is what “you” will be come. Thus linguists would consider this to be the “object” of the sentence. English is what linguists consider to be a “subject-verb-object” language. In a typical English sentence, like the de-Yodafied sentence we just broke down, the order of these sentence elements generally falls in this order. But not all languages are like this. In fact, the most common type of language is the “subject-object-verb” language, where the sentence we just broke down would instead be written as “You a Jedi will be.” According to a study conducted in the 1980s, SOV languages make up 45% of the languages in the world. SVO languages, like English, are a close second, with 42% of all the world’s languages. As you may have noticed, both of these forms lace the subject first. This seems to be logical: the subject is the most important part of the sentence, so it makes sense to put it first. But Yoda’s way of speaking gives regular English a new structure, which would be considered an “object-subject-verb” language. Of the languages that exist on Earth, and not in a galaxy far far away, only 1% are OSV languages. But here’s the funny part: despite the fact that Yodafied English is a dramatic reshuffling of the conventional word order of English, English speakers can still understand it perfectly. And this raises an important point about the entire grammatical analysis we just did: there is actually a lot of flexibility in the order that subjects, objects, and verbs are stated. Take a famous example in German: Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner”. Or in English, “I am a Berliner”. This is correct, but Germans could just as easily phrase it as “Ich ein Berliner bin”: “I a Berliner am”. As a result, German is mostly considered to be an SOV language. Romance languages are also considered SOV, but for a very different reason. Let’s take an example in Spanish. If you were to say “I ate a burrito” in Spanish it would translate as “Yo comí un burrito.” In both English and Spanish, the sentence is structured as SVO. But what happens if in the context of the sentence, it’s clear you’re already talking about a taco? Take this conversation: “Did you eat the burrito?” “Yes, I ate it.” In Spanish, when you translate this exchange, now the word order changes “Tú comiste el burrito?” “Si, yo lo comí.” In English, the second sentence here would literally translate as “I it ate”. And since this SOV ordering actually happens more often in Spanish, and other Romance languages, they are officially considered SOV languages. But despite all of these nit-picky grammatical examples, all languages exhibit a great deal of flexibility in how sentence elements are ordered. Just look at Yodafied English: despite the fact that Yoda has reshuffled English into a word ordering that only appears In 1% of the world’s languages, speakers of conventional English can understand it just fine. As Master Yoda himself would say, “Not very important, sentence structure is.” Image: custardbasket.blogspot.com Today is Christmas. It's a time when many of us come together with our families to give thanks for our friends and family, and maybe give each other a few presents. For those of us who don't celebrate Christmas, there are also a number of holidays, both religious and secular, that fall during this time of year and whose purpose is basically the same: a celebration of the good fortunes we may have had during the year, and of the happiness those around us bring to us all.
But though some of us may have the good fortune to be able to take time off to celebrate Christmas and other holidays, others do not. Recently, it was revealed that the crisis in Syria and other countries in the Middle East and Africa has prompted over 1 million refugees to seek shelter in Europe. In the United States, unrest in Central America has generated a new wave of migration from these countries similar to the spike of migrations experienced in 2014. And these are just two of the most visible cases of migration crises being felt around the world. Migration is a hotly contested issue worldwide. Some have seized on migrations as an opportunity to stir up nativist sentiments for political gain. And it is true that, among the immense number of migrants around the world, there may be a small percentage who are criminals or other people who pose a threat to those in the lands they come to. But even the most hard-hearted among us would admit that, despite these problematic refugees, the vast majority are not criminals but regular people like you and me, who are living through a time of extreme need and could use our help. This holiday season, some of us are lucky enough to be able to take time off and be with our families and friends. But others aren't. And there would be nothing more fitting for the holiday spirit than to lend a hand to those less fortunate than ourselves, living through one of the many crises going on in the world at this time. There are many ways we can help those in need. Many great, hard-working charitable organizations exist whose goal is to improve the lives of people in need, and you can help them by donating money or, depending on where you are located, showing up as a volunteer. But if neither of these are possible, there's another way you can help: by volunteering as a translator or a corrector. At first, the thought of volunteering as a translator may seem trivial. But Translators Without Borders, an organization dedicated to helping organize volunteer translators, issues a stark warning on its homepage about how essential translating can be in critical situations around the world: "Language barriers cost lives." If you happen to know another language, your ability to translate can help people around the world. Though it's true that machine translations can help bridge the gap, in certain translations (especially medical translations and translations of technical material) critical information can be misinterpreted or simply translated incorrectly by software, meaning that human translations are still essential in many cases. If you happen to speak or be proficient in another language, your ability to translate can make a difference, and you can choose to help by signing up with groups like TWB or many others. Even if you don't know another language, you can help translation efforts by volunteering as a corrector in your native language. Though this role is not as strongly emphasized by groups like TWB, correction is still a key part of translation, especially cases in which translators may not be native speakers of their target language, which can be the case in large scale volunteer projects. As a corrector, you can help to make sure the translated document is fully comprehensible in the target language, and also flag areas where essential details are written in a way that is unclear or unintelligible. And the other advantage of this work is that you don't have to be located in a crisis area to do it, you can easily work on it from wherever you are located. Of course, translating and correcting as a volunteer won't solve the massive problems the world faces overnight. But for every person in need of a translation - a refugee who needs his documents translated, a patient in critical condition in a conflict zone, or one of the millions of other people around the world who desperately need something written in another language - your work can make all the difference. You may never meet the people you're helping. But perhaps next year when the holidays come around, there will be one more person who is no longer in danger of sickness, grave injury, or even death, and can instead take time to celebrate with his or her family and friends. And that person will have you to thank. |
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