Yoda Uses Rarest Word Order

One of the unusual speech patterns associated with Star Wars character Yoda is object-subject-verb, or OSV, as in "The greatest teacher, failure is." In this structure, the object comes before the subject and verb, reversing the order familiar to most English speakers. OSV is the rarest of the six basic word orders identified in linguistic typology, appearing as the dominant order in only about 0.3% of surveyed languages.

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