Yoda: How to speak French like a complete alien.

Like many people of my generation, I grew up with a big brother who was utterly obsessed with Star Wars.  However, unfortunately for Javier, he was the only member of our large family who was fixated on the every move of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo and friends.  So, throughout Javier’s childhood, there was nothing more amusing in my household than making fun of this trilogy that, in most families throughout the planet Earth, was a virtually universal addiction.  Javier suffered through this ridicule in utter serenity, as any good Jedi would do.

Of all the insane and bizarre characters, plot lines and dialogue in the Star Wars movies, the material that I most tormented my brother with was anything and everything having to do with Yoda.  The most ridiculous personal attribute of Yoda’s that I seized on was, naturally, his speech.  Yoda may have had many great strengths as a Jedi knight, but grammar was not one of them.  Although the logic of his wisdom generally came through, it was filtered through the sort of bad syntax and word usage that gives little sisters a headache and I imagine must have given our grammar teachers seizures.

As I watched over my brother’s shoulders, Yoda would say things like:

 - “Not if anything to say about it I have.”

 - “Named must your fear be before you banish it you can.”

 - And my personal favorite: “Size matters not.”

Now, several decades and thousands of miles from that particular place in time and space that was my childhood, I find myself, as a foreigner with inadequate French language skills, sounding very much like that great master of the force, Yoda himself.  I often say a sentence in French but forget to invert this or flip that and instead use rules of grammar from either English or Spanish, so it comes out all wrong.  I say things in French that, to my listener, sound like Yoda-speak—perfectly good ideas, all jumbled up into nonsense.

Similarly, my French friends who speak to me in English consistently get pronouns all wrong—they’re out of order, in the wrong gender and often pointlessly repetitive; they say things like “Me, I find that the weather, he is beautiful today.”

On the bright side, Yoda grammar sometimes makes mundane thoughts seem far deeper than they actually are, like the above comment, which could have just as easily come out as “dude, it’s sunny.”  So Yoda grammar can take boring comments and make them seem Old-Worldishly poetic and sophisticated in English, as in “the stapler, he does not function well”, which gives my stapler—the inanimate, plastic contraption sitting right here on my desk—a degree of masculinity, personality and even sophisticated vocabulary.  Yoda has thereby inadvertently used the force to elevate my stapler to a higher plane of existence.  But then I throw it away because, well, it doesn’t work.

However, some sentences just can’t be improved by Old World charm, no matter how thick it is.  As I write this, a coworker just came into my office to inform me that, “the toilet, she is missing hygienic paper,” which leaves far too little to the imagination.

Long live Yoda.  And may the force be with him.