Re: (chat) Yoda's word order

Hello,

Christopher Wright wrote:

> >I just saw the new Star Wars today. Could anyone comment on Yoda's
> sentence
> >structure? Listening to him, I found it very interesting.
> >Yoda's sentences, very novel they were. In this list, talk
> about them,
> we
> >will. :)
>
> He seems to use a sentence order of VOS most of the time ("Help you I
> can").
I guess it isn't all that abnormal in non-Modern English, like "stand by
you I will, and that blithely" (where "will" may safely be a modal).

> However, he switches to OVS for dependent clauses ("When nine
> hundred years you reach, look as good you will not").
I may be all the more mistaken, but the first sentence is OSV?

> I don't know about noun phrases, since he doesn't use many, but they
would seem
> to be normal
> English.
How do you know? :-)

Pavel
--
Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru

'I am a philologist, and thus a misunderstood man'
                 --JRR Tolkien, _The Notion Club Papers_