"I used to think the worst thing in life was to be all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone." Robin Williams
Yoda is a character from the "Star Wars" series of films. Technically, when the characters in "Star Wars" speak in a language we can understand (English), they are actually speaking Basic, or the common language of the Star Wars universe.
Basically, Yoda speaks just like any other English (Basic) speaker, but his sentences are often out of order, or in an order not commonly used in English (as a weakly inflecting language, English can allow many different word orders) much like those of someone who has learned English as a second language, but sometimes confuses English word-order with that of their mother language.
No official Star Wars source has ever answered the question of why Yoda speaks backwards. One possible explanation is that his speech patterns are simply how his species talks. The lack of evidence makes it difficult to prove or disprove this theory. In the entire Expanded Universe, we only see four examples of Yoda's species: Yoda himself; Yaddle, the "female Yoda" who appears in the Prequel Trilogy; Minch, from a short story in Star Wars Tales; and Vandar Tokare, from Knights of the Old Republic. Another explanation is a difference in language. Yoda's syntax resembles that of a non-native English speaker who imports sentence structures from his native language. This could explain why Vandar Tokare doesn't have the same speech patterns, if he was raised speaking a different language. Still, Yoda is 900 years old -- certainly he's spoken Basic long enough to learn the rules of the language.
Another great example of Moore's Law. Give people access to that much space (developers and users alike) and they'll find uses for it that you can never imagine. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates 1981
Comments
Yoda is a character from the "Star Wars" series of films. Technically, when the characters in "Star Wars" speak in a language we can understand (English), they are actually speaking Basic, or the common language of the Star Wars universe.
Basically, Yoda speaks just like any other English (Basic) speaker, but his sentences are often out of order, or in an order not commonly used in English (as a weakly inflecting language, English can allow many different word orders) much like those of someone who has learned English as a second language, but sometimes confuses English word-order with that of their mother language.
No official Star Wars source has ever answered the question of why Yoda speaks backwards. One possible explanation is that his speech patterns are simply how his species talks. The lack of evidence makes it difficult to prove or disprove this theory. In the entire Expanded Universe, we only see four examples of Yoda's species: Yoda himself; Yaddle, the "female Yoda" who appears in the Prequel Trilogy; Minch, from a short story in Star Wars Tales; and Vandar Tokare, from Knights of the Old Republic. Another explanation is a difference in language. Yoda's syntax resembles that of a non-native English speaker who imports sentence structures from his native language. This could explain why Vandar Tokare doesn't have the same speech patterns, if he was raised speaking a different language. Still, Yoda is 900 years old -- certainly he's spoken Basic long enough to learn the rules of the language.
Another great example of Moore's Law. Give people access to that much space (developers and users alike) and they'll find uses for it that you can never imagine. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates 1981
But now we know why : )
Nice to hear it from Frank.
Yoda uses Japanese grammar structure.