This could be the drugs talking.
May 22, 2005 – 9:54 PMAnd you know, it probably is. But upon careful consideration I have arrived at the conclusion that somebody at Lucasfilms is a serious linguistics nerd, and I'm fully prepared to defend this position.
Modern English is not a heavily inflected language. Inflected languages rely on word endings to denote things such as plurality or the recipient/inflictee of an action. An example of this in Modern English would be the word “children,” as a plural form for child.
But Old English (and to some extent, Middle English) was more heavily inflected. We're comfortable in Modern English with Subject + Verb + Object (SVO) ordering for our sentences. It tells us who did what to whom.
The man kisses the woman.
The woman kisses the man.
Kisses the man the woman.
The man the woman kisses.
You get the idea. Without SVO word order, it quickly gets confusing trying to figure out who did what. But in Old and Middle English, it was very common to see variants such as OSV, VSO, SVO, etc, because the word endings told more about who was performing which action, rather than the order of the words themselves.
In short, Yoda is an Old English motherfucker whose sentences require a lot of untangling because he's still using the jumbled word ordering of an inflected language without any of his words actually being inflected, which confuses us for .75 seconds before we go “Oh! That was clever!” to cover up for the fact that there's no real reason for him to mix up his word order if he's not going to use a language inflected enough to make it logical or at least less confusing.
But this isn't why somebody at Lucasfilms is a lingustics nerd. In fact, the above gives me great pause, because they only got the language thing half-right when it came to making Yoda sound ancient. No, the second thing I would like to point out tonight is actually somewhat cool, and a cursory Google search on the subject didn't yield any other theories of correlation on this, so I wonder how many other people have noticed this.
Darth Vader, people. “Vader” is an old germanic word meaning “father.” THERE'S YOUR FIRST CLUE, LUKE. This word is and was extremely similar in all the germanic/italic/romance languages that descended from the Indo-European family of languages. Pater/vader/bader, etc. “Vader” is actually a Dutch word for “father,” if Google doesn't lie. I'm sure in Dutch it's actually pronounced “vahder”, but there you go. Dutch persons can correct me if I'm wrong, but it would only serve to solidify my theory that somebody at Lucasfilms has at least done a half-assed job of doing their homework in the linguistics field.
That's all. I should probably go to sleep now.
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Keith's comment from the other room: “I don't know what's wrong with you. You started taking Prozac, and now you're this Star Wars nerd.”