Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Yoda Speak Anyone?

So being a Star Wars nerd, this article naturally caught my eye. Then I remembered there are some language peeps on here (Lynn ) and thought y'all might find it interesting too.

Very interesting article. Anything Star Wars always catches my eye, but the article itself was good. It's strange to think that language has evolved kind of in a backwards way... thanks for the link!

Fascinating!

Thanks for the article.

FWIW, I am convinced that the first languages were probably signed languages. (A chapter of a book I co-edited made that very argument. It was co-authored by William Stokoe, the founder of sign language linguistics. I thought the chapter made a compelling case.) FWIW, American Sign Language (ASL) would also be SOV. (Does anyone here know any other sign languages?)

I will say that the article did oversimplify things slightly. ASL, for example, has an underlying SOV structure, but it is much freer than English is with regard to the order in which things are articulated. Latin is that way, too -- there is an underlying word order, but it is not necessary to stick to that order. In English, word order is very important: The dog chased the cat means something completely different than The cat chased the dog. But in Latin, Canis felim fugavit and Felim canis fugavit both mean The dog chased the cat. (Disclaimer: It has been nearly three decades since my last Latin class. I *think* I have that correct, but I might be off on the endings.) In Latin, it is the ending of the words, not the word order, that determines which noun is the subject and which is the direct object of the verb. For that matter, you could have any of the other four possible word orders for the same three Latin words, and the basic meaning of the sentence would remain unchanged. The different orders would change the style and the emphasis, but not the meaning. Sort of like the following sentences in English:

The dog chased the cat.
It was the dog that chased the cat.
As for the cat, the dog chased it.
The chasing of the cat was done by the dog.
What the dog chased was the cat.

This analogy is imperfect, since the written English example requires a lot of additional verbiage to put the focus on specific words. A better analogy would be saying the same words each time, but stressing specific words:

The DOG chased the cat.
The dog CHASED the cat.
The dog chased the CAT.

Unfortunately, that doesn't come across very well in written language.

I wish I had time to write more, but my break at work has already been too long.

Joy,
Lynn

My father-in-law is a professor of German, and he tells a joke about a German professor whose friend found him in the neighborhood bar, weeping inconsolably over his beer.

"What's wrong?" the friend asked.

Between sobs, the professor told him, "I've been working for years on my ten-volume treatise, and the publisher just told me that they don't have the budget to publish the last volume--they will only publish the first nine."

"Nine out of ten--that's not so bad," his friend tried to console him.

But the professor could not be cheered up so easily. "You don't understand," he wailed, "all the verbs were in the last volume!"

HappyGirl - that's a great joke! I don't speak German, and I got my understanding of the joke from Mark Twain's great little essay, "The Awful German Language".

Here's a quote of the relevant section:

And another great quote about verbs in German grammar:

The joke could also be interpreted in another way. In some, mostly scientific German texts the real information is in the nouns and not in the verb. Maybe that's why they're in the last book

I too had a good laugh at Mark Twains essay. But nowadays the sentences in German newspapers have become a lot shorter. And Mark Twain might be exaggerating things a little