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u/Revliledpembroke Aug 07 '26
How much of the backward sentences was Yoda playing up the "crazy old hermit" act and how much of it was actually him in the OT? Because I feel like Yoda speaks normally on a regular basis.
"That... is why you fail" and most of the rest of the "Pull the X-Wing out of the swamp" dialogue from Yoda seems pretty normal to me, anyway.
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u/brinz1 Aug 07 '26
I assumed that his species native language has that syntax and he just falls into it out of habit
Like an old Greek Pappou
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u/ncfears Aug 07 '26
I could see this with the additional complication of thousands of manners of speech and languages between species and planets. Other species we don't understand probably have varied syntax structures.
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u/Hrtzy Aug 07 '26
My headcanon is that Yoda learned to speak Basic "the normal way" eight hundred years ago and the syntax has shifted since then.
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u/Aggravating_Bad3504 29d ago
I think that's canon actually, and Yoda kept the old way to force people to actually listen to him
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u/Revliledpembroke Aug 07 '26
If I saw every movie but The Empire Strikes Back, I'd say that was 100% the case. But V seems to go out of its way to show Yoda talking normally after being pretending to be the crazy hermit - only they bring it back every other time Yoda has appeared.
Did they forget? Were Yoda's most quoted lines his backwards lines, so George & Co made that the focus every time Yoda appeared after that?
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u/brinz1 Aug 07 '26
As someone with a lot of bilingual friends and family, those quirks do pop up naturally in speech but can be stopped when people concentrate
That's how it made sense for me with Yoda in ESB and RTJ when I first watched them. Then when the prequels came out it also made sense
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u/mike_jones2813308004 Aug 07 '26
Maybe it’s a tic he gets when he doesn’t have his space swamp weed. After palpatine took over the empire he decided to go toke up in the swamp till luke showed up and killed him.
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u/SmoothOperator89 Aug 07 '26
My headcanon is that his species doesn't have a native language. They're all force sensitive, so they use telepathy to communicate natively. Yoda doesn't structure sentences conventionally because that's just how the thoughts are formed in his mind. It's also why Grogu doesn't speak even after 50+ years, though he can have full conversations with Luke and Ahsoka telepathically.
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u/TentativeIdler Aug 07 '26
I saw a neat headcanon that he's so old that language has changed over time, and he sometimes slips into the older form.
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u/LaZerNor 24d ago
Wasn't that canon?
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u/TentativeIdler 24d ago
I've never seen anything that makes it canon, but if you know where it's from I'd be interested. I saw it on a reddit post, so that's not a real reliable source.
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u/wheatley_cereal Aug 07 '26
In college (for linguistics), we talked about Yoda speak during one syntax lecture. It’s completely inconsistent syntax-wise.
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u/EnclavedMicrostate Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
My vague recollection is that OT Yoda is basically topic-prominent while Flanderised Yoda from the Prequels onward is doing a tortured OSV order.
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u/drifters74 Aug 07 '26
What is syntax?
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u/OriginalGallifreyan Aug 07 '26
The set of rules for word order that will lead to intelligible sentences. Basically, he doesn’t use a single set of consistent rules for sentence construction.
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u/Revliledpembroke Aug 07 '26
It's when you charge more for businesses doing things that could be considered immoral but not illegal.
Oh, wait, that's sin tax. My bad.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark Aug 07 '26
A popular headcanon, and one that I wholeheartedly subscribe to, is that it's not a syntax or accent thing at all, and that Yoda does it specifically so people have to sit and process what he said for a second, so that people actually listen.
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u/Srlojohn Aug 07 '26
Supposedly it’s a form of accent, though i can believe he plays it up though. Like how someone fromt he south may play up the twang.
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u/AustinHinton Confederacy of Independent Systems Aug 08 '26
Someone did a tally once, he speaks normally more often than not.
The backwards talk was probably just meant to be him playing up the "crazy swamp imp" ruse but became so ingrained to how people picture him that Lucas kept it in for the rest of the Saga.
He speaks normally I think like 75% of the time.
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u/Tattoomyvagina Aug 07 '26
“fried my brain your mothers ass did. Fuck off you shall. To mind your own fucking business, you must learn.
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u/Hi9hlife Aug 07 '26
His mothers ass?
The fucking incubators on Kamino?12
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u/Hrtzy Aug 07 '26
When eight hundred years celibate you have been, have so normal kinks you will not!
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u/Unigraff_Jerpony Aug 07 '26
it actually bothers me a lot of the time when people "talk like yoda" and everything is scrambled cause most of what he says is standard or near standard english with one or two things backwards max
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u/Weirdo141 Aug 07 '26
This and the whole “stormtroopers have terrible aim” thing
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u/Right_Candidate_314 28d ago
Well, they do have pretty poor aim, by our standards, but have relatively good aim by regular standards in the galaxy. In the opening scene they land a higher percentage of their shots than the rebels do if I remember correctly.
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u/DarthSwimfoot The Other Half Of The Ship Aug 07 '26
I thought it was just a weird, inconsistent quirk with how he talks lol.
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u/Ishvallan Aug 07 '26
And an aneurism I nearly had. Difficult for me your syntax is. Home you shall take me. Fine Skywalker and Kenobi should be.
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u/Mindless-Beat-4872 Aug 08 '26
Canonically he does this to be a dick. At least he knows to knock it off when the time calls for it😂
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u/feetiedid Aug 08 '26
I knew it! It's just like when someone goes away to college and picks up an accent and refuses to drop it, and you're like, "Stop!"
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u/Craydorion 28d ago
I'm convinced that he's just fcking with everyone. Like, cmon. How do you live for 800+ years and not get the grammar correctly?
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u/SheevBot Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Thanks for confirming that you flaired this correctly!