I wonder if there are many of his PT lines (and to a lesser extent ROTJ lines) which could be re-organised to be less of a parody by simple audio reshuffling (as always the embedded music scores and sound effects would be the prime obstacle).

With a little bit of ironing out (selective pitch alteration, inserting missing words and a little smoothing of the audio jumps) that makes a world of difference to that scene.

Already a significant improvement begun has.

TV's Frink said:

But it's not much use for my edit - is no funny!

This.**

Oh, this is awesome.  Yoda's speech in the PT has bugged me for the longest time, and I remember the exact moment it came to me.  It was when I was watching AOTC in theatres, and Yoda had two lines during the end battle that made my head spin:  "Around the survivors a perimeter create!" and, "To the forward command center take me!"  Those two were just so poorly written that it was almost like a joke.  But the real kicker for me was in ROTS where he says, "A prophecy that misread may have been."  I remember the first time I heard that I couldn't even comprehend what the hell he was saying!

But I do have a question in regards to "AotC Total: 21/56 lines are odd, 55%."  Did you make a typo somewhere?  Because how does 21 out of 56 equal 55 percent when doubling 21 only gives you 42?

twooffour said:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization

Very, very odd results - I had expected the prequels to be somewhere up in the 90% region, and the OT somewhere 20-30% .

I'll pay attention whenever I'm gonna watch it again...

Thanks, 2/4, "Fladerization" is the term I was trying to think of.

I figured those kind of numbers too, which is why I did this. At first I was doing it by blocks of dialog, but Yoda has a few speeches where only one sentence is odd, so I broke it down sentence by sentence. That also messed things up, because he has a few three word sentences that aren't backwards on their own, but might be questionable in context.

Gaffer Tape said:

Oh, this is awesome.  Yoda's speech in the PT has bugged me for the longest time, and I remember the exact moment it came to me.  It was when I was watching AOTC in theatres, and Yoda had two lines during the end battle that made my head spin:  "Around the survivors a perimeter create!" and, "To the forward command center take me!"  Those two were just so poorly written that it was almost like a joke.  But the real kicker for me was in ROTS where he says, "A prophecy that misread may have been."  I remember the first time I heard that I couldn't even comprehend what the hell he was saying!

It seemed like in the OT, when Yoda wanted to be serious, he spoke correctly. But in the PT, these few year old clones have to translate what he's commanding them to do in the heat of battle. Dumb.

Gaffer Tape said:

But I do have a question in regards to "AotC Total: 21/56 lines are odd, 55%."  Did you make a typo somewhere?  Because how does 21 out of 56 equal 55 percent when doubling 21 only gives you 42?

Sorry, typo, 31/56

Just another example of the prequels trying way too hard to be like "Star Wars".

The OT may seem to have almost as much inversion as the prequels, but this doesn't account for the actual content of what is being said.

Most of Yoda's ESB dialogue when he gets serious is not backwards speech. Rather, it is stylized to sound Medieval, and also give it an antiquated feeling, but is grammatically acceptable. The dialogue sounds very similar to the way Tolkien writes and the way some of his characters speak, a sort of reverent pre-20th century type of flowery sentence structure.

"Told you, did I--reckless is he. Now, matters are worse....No, there is another."

There is nothing backwards about any of that. "Told you, did I" is a perfectly acceptable antique-English sort of phrase. "Reckless is he, like his father." Same thing. "Easily they flow, quick to join one in a fight." "That place is strong with the dark side of the Force--in you must go." To me, these don't sound "backwards" so much as they have stylized elements to them which inverts part of the grammer to sound pre-modern but is nonetheless grammatically acceptable.

The prequels follow suit a lot of the time, and contain some inversion-free sentences. However, key pieces of dialogue are not just inverted, but made backwards to the point where they don't even make sense--and this is what stands out, so it seems like the character hasn't been understood. "A prophecy that misread could have been," as someone pointed out--what? If this was the OT first of all that sentence would have been completely normal, but if it had to have an inverted element it would have been "Misread the prophecy could have been." And, it is the fact that there are unnecessarily-inverted sentences--even if only two or three per film--that further stand out, such as "to the forward command centre take me", which is grammatically fine as an inversion, but one senses unnecessarily so, and that in the OT this line would have been left normal.

So, firstly, even though the OT-PT contrast is not extreme in terms of ratio, the two or three unnecessary uses per film make a big difference, and secondly, I think most of the OT examples aren't true "backwards speak" but simply pre-modern stylization, and while the PT has mostly legit uses of this it has truely backwards nonesense sentences that the OT would have never had. I do feel like ROTJ has a lot of these problems too, but they are not nearly as bad. I guess once ESB was over Lucas (and maybe Kasdan) never fully grasped how his own dialogue was structured, or maybe it was Kershner who made it more sensible all along.

There were several lines I debated whether they were old timey or just wrong.

My college roommate who is a linguist agreed to take a look at my spreadsheet, we'll see what conclusions he can come to. I also sent him a link to this thread.

HI, ROOMMATE!

TV's Frink said:

doubleofive said:
OH HAI, ROOMMATE!

Better.

"You're right, haha."

captainsolo said:

Just another example of the prequels trying way too hard

This