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.” |
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