A grammar lesson, or crazy I am
I don't know about you, but we have been hit full force with the Yoda phenomenon. I would blame this on Baby Yoda, but I can't. (And yes, I know Baby Yoda is not his name. According to D. his actual name is Nigel. I will continue to call him Baby Yoda, just like I still use the terms Marshall Field's, the Sear's Tower, and Comisky Park.) What I blame it on is the recorded book G. and L. brought home that has something to do with Origami Yoda.
Since I try very, very hard to not listen to the endless recorded books which are nearly constantly playing in my house, I can't actually tell you what it is about, except that it seems to be a school story which also has a character named Origami Yoda. I am still very unclear how this works, but don't really care to have someone explain it to me. What it does mean is that the house is awash with origami Star Wars characters, mainly Yoda.
This would be fine. I could deal with this. But the other thing that has happened is that G. and L. (particularly L.) have taken on Yoda's syntax with a vengeance. At first this is amusing, particularly since L. uses an accent when talking like Yoda which is somewhere between Indian and Scottish, often weaving back and forth between the two so that you don't know what country you are in. Or in you are.
And here is the worst part, the syntax has invaded everything all the time. And it's infectious so that even if you are annoyed by it, you still find yourself thinking is slightly backwards sentences. This is why I found myself mentally diagramming sentences in the shower this afternoon. Not every sentence is backwards, and I was trying to figure out if there was some sort of rule. (This is what happens when you become a homeschooling parent and teach sentence diagramming for twenty years. Beware.) I realized I needed some more data other than odd sounding twins.
After my shower I decided to look up quotes by Yoda. Thus, my findings are based on one cursory Google search where I only looked at two pages. We like depth and accuracy around here. Based on myextensive research, I have concluded that Yoda only switches the word order on sentences containing a predicate nominative. Doesn't that sound impressive?
Predicate nominatives are a very fancy way of saying the word that comes after a sentence which contains a state of being. Sentences which have a form of 'to be' will often contain predicate nominatives. For example, the sentence, "I am a mother" contains a predicate nominative. 'I' is the subject, 'am' is the predicate or verb, and 'mother' is the predicate nominative. You can tell because if you were to reverse the order, "Mother am I" still makes sense even if it is not how we would usually communicate the idea. If you know a little something about diagramming, predicate nominatives come after the slanty line following the predicate (verb) in the skeleton. If I could figure out how, I would draw you a picture.
Yoda takes all of his predicate nominatives and places them first, but keeps the subject-verb order the same, so Yoda would say that sentence, "Mother I am," except he is not a mother so he wouldn't ever really say that. All the other quotes I found from Yoda keep typical English word order in tact, even those with direct objects which are very close to predicate nominatives in structure.
See? That's why you come here to visit. All the useless information you never thought about and didn't really need to know.
Since I try very, very hard to not listen to the endless recorded books which are nearly constantly playing in my house, I can't actually tell you what it is about, except that it seems to be a school story which also has a character named Origami Yoda. I am still very unclear how this works, but don't really care to have someone explain it to me. What it does mean is that the house is awash with origami Star Wars characters, mainly Yoda.
Origami Yoda by L.
This would be fine. I could deal with this. But the other thing that has happened is that G. and L. (particularly L.) have taken on Yoda's syntax with a vengeance. At first this is amusing, particularly since L. uses an accent when talking like Yoda which is somewhere between Indian and Scottish, often weaving back and forth between the two so that you don't know what country you are in. Or in you are.
And here is the worst part, the syntax has invaded everything all the time. And it's infectious so that even if you are annoyed by it, you still find yourself thinking is slightly backwards sentences. This is why I found myself mentally diagramming sentences in the shower this afternoon. Not every sentence is backwards, and I was trying to figure out if there was some sort of rule. (This is what happens when you become a homeschooling parent and teach sentence diagramming for twenty years. Beware.) I realized I needed some more data other than odd sounding twins.
After my shower I decided to look up quotes by Yoda. Thus, my findings are based on one cursory Google search where I only looked at two pages. We like depth and accuracy around here. Based on my
Predicate nominatives are a very fancy way of saying the word that comes after a sentence which contains a state of being. Sentences which have a form of 'to be' will often contain predicate nominatives. For example, the sentence, "I am a mother" contains a predicate nominative. 'I' is the subject, 'am' is the predicate or verb, and 'mother' is the predicate nominative. You can tell because if you were to reverse the order, "Mother am I" still makes sense even if it is not how we would usually communicate the idea. If you know a little something about diagramming, predicate nominatives come after the slanty line following the predicate (verb) in the skeleton. If I could figure out how, I would draw you a picture.
Yoda takes all of his predicate nominatives and places them first, but keeps the subject-verb order the same, so Yoda would say that sentence, "Mother I am," except he is not a mother so he wouldn't ever really say that. All the other quotes I found from Yoda keep typical English word order in tact, even those with direct objects which are very close to predicate nominatives in structure.
See? That's why you come here to visit. All the useless information you never thought about and didn't really need to know.
Comments