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Yoda may be one of the most iconic figures in Star Wars, but the Jedi Master remains one of the franchise's biggest mysteries – with even George Lucas admitting that he "never really figured out" where Yoda was from or what his species was called.
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But it turns out that Luke Skywalker's small-but-wise tutor is actually from a galaxy (not so) far far away – according to one university professor, anyway.
Linguistics professor David Adger has concluded that Yoda's famously confused speech patterns show he "grew up" in Hawaii — and that his back-to-front phrases are the result of him translating his thoughts into English.
Prof Adger, of Queen Mary University of London, said he studied Yoda's speech using "linguistic detective work" and a process called "transfer" to discover that the Jedi Master's original language, which he "grew up speaking", was Hawaiian.
He told PA: "All the other creatures in Star Wars speak their own languages. With the Ewoks, Wookiees and Jabba The Hutt, they subtitle a chunk of it, so they're all speaking their own language.
"Yoda comes from a mysterious planet and George Lucas never tells us anything about Yoda... he's meant to be this mysterious Jedi Master.
"But he's obviously speaking English as a second language... His real language, which I've called Yodish, we don't know anything about."
Professor Adger explained: "He's speaking English but changed the structure of it to be like his native language.
"We can find out something about Yoda's native language by looking at how he speaks English, in the same way as I can find out about a French person's native language by looking at how that French person speaks English.
"You use English words but retain some of the structures from that native language.
"Yoda says things like, 'The greatest teacher, failure is'. If you were to say that in Hawaiian it would be almost exactly the same – putting the predicate before the subject.
"Whatever the scriptwriters are doing is not too far off the mark from what Hawaiian is like."
Here's hoping Disney's next move includes a few Yoda prequels – after all, there's more than 800 years of lifespan to play with...
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