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Last week we wondered how Yoda’s syntactical mischief is expressed in other languages. Tom from Battersea sheds light on the linguistic larkery:
Re: Star Wars in other languages, I couldn’t resist piping up, as I spent a year in my early twenties making replica light sabers in an Umbrian hill town. I was so poor I lived off stale panettone and coffee for weeks at a time, and it was so cold in my tiny flat that the oil set hard in my cupboard.
Wait right there, Tom – this sounds like a promising scenario for a rom com! Do any of you readers have an in with the greenlight guy at Universal?
Il Maestro Yoda does indeed fuck around with standard sentence structure in the same way as in English, sticking the verb at the end for wise effect. For example, instead of saying ‘TU HAI molta fretta giovane Jedi’ [you have much haste, young Jedi], he says, ‘Molta fretta HAI TU, giovane Jedi’ [much haste have you, young Jedi].
It is a different bloke who did the dubbing for the recent ‘prequel’ Star Wars films, but he tries to maintain the same sound as the bloke who dubbed the original films. In general, Yoda’s voice is less guttural in Italian than the English voice, less alien, and more wise old man, sort of thing – they’re trying to recreate an Umberto-Eco-after-six-hours-of-armchair-discussion at an Italian arts festival type of character, rather than the grumpy persona George Lucas originally went for.
Sounds much better than the original! Umberto Eco would certainly be a pleasing addition to the Star Wars oeuvre, although probably has less appeal than Yoda in the range of spin-off collectable dolls and backpacks.
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Answer Me This! Podcast 
May 6, 2010 at 2:51 pm |
Yoda speaks Japanese!
At least he speaks English with loose Japanese grammar. The myth is that Yoda (a fairly common Japanese surname by the way) speaks the way he does because of George Lucas’s love of everything Samurai. Star Wars is often said to be based on Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress.
In Japanese the verb comes at the end of the sentence.
For example Yoda desu = Yoda I am.
Obviously when it was being translated it back to Japanese nobody got the joke because Yoda speaks perfect Japanese and sounds perfectly fine in his native language.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2632170/Woman-called-Yoda-blocked-from-Facebook.html