The contention with most critics is that Yoda in the prequels speaks in a more backwards, convoluted manner--"around the survivors, a perimeter create"--whereas in the originals his lines are much more normal than we would remember--"I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience." Keep in mind that many of the most ridiculous lines in the originals come from the early part of Empire Strikes Back, where Yoda is pretending to be crazy and speaks in a very inverted manner. Yoda still inverts his speech in the later sections, but in way which recalls archaic forms of English. Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan has claimed in Annotated Screenplays that he deliberately made Yoda sound medieval in the inversions.

Of course, many would say that the sentence structure of Yoda in the prequels, at least for the most part, is consistent with this presentation. So, what is the case? Well, this is one area where a systematic study can aid us with understanding the structure of how Lucas and associates wrote dialogue for the character. This was done by my friend Drew Stewart, who first compiled a spreadsheet of all of Yoda's lines throughout the original trilogy and prequel trilogy, with each line flagged as either normal or "odd" (that is, contains inverted word orders). He at first considered it by blocks of text, but because there were normal sentences surrounded by odd ones, he did it on a sentence by sentence basis. His results were this:

ESB, "crazy swamp creature": 13/23 lines are odd, 57%
ESB, serious Yoda: 30/73 lines are odd, 41%
ESB Total: 43/96 lines are odd, 45%
RotJ Total: 18/33 lines are odd, 55%
TPM Total: 19/26 lines are odd, 73%
AotC Total: 31/56 lines are odd, 55%
RotS Total: 46/66 lines are odd, 70%

Discounting the "crazy swamp creature" persona, the OT figures of 41% and 55% average to 48%, while the PT's figures average out to 66%, which means the Yoda of the prequels has a nearly 20% increase in the number of odd-sounding lines. It is tempting to say that the very large drop for Attack of the Clones may be due to co-screenwriter Jonathan Hales influence, as this is the only film of the trio with an official co-writer credit, which happens to bring the odd-sentence frequency back to the levels of ESB/ROTJ, both of which were also co-written by someone other than Lucas (Lawrence Kasdan). This seems too big a coincidence to avoid pointing out. The Lucas-only screenplays are in the 70% range, while the Lucas+co-writer screenplays are all around the 50% range.

But moving on, taking into account the above tabulation, this means that Yoda does indeed speak in a noticeably more backwards way in the prequels. However, at a difference of 18%, this may not be as extreme as some may be expecting; by my own expectation, I would have thought the OT to have only 40% odd, with the prequels closer to 80% (a 40% difference, twice the reality). So, these are surprising and interesting results (comparison on a one-on-one basis makes it less surprising, however, as ESB's 41% and TPM's 73% show pretty wide disparity). However, and this is a big however, this is not the end of the matter. We have yet to actually examine the sentence structures themselves. While Yoda has only an 18% overall difference of "backwards" sentences between the trilogies, we shall find that upon examination these figures do change quite drastically in terms of how they matter.

To aid in this examination, Drew Stewart recruited his friend Tim MacSaveny: a professional linguist. So, his findings here might be a bit on the dense side in terms of technical linguistic terminology but I will try to keep things clarified.

Both sets of films have both normal Yoda lines as well as lines with inverted or out-of-order grammatical elements. However, the difference is that these inverted lines in the original trilogy are basically archaically structured, but nonetheless grammatically sound. This probably reflects screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan's desire that they sound medieval. On the other hand, many of the prequel trilogy lines are both inverted yet also grammatically incorrect. This will be elaborated on in a moment, and it largely has to do with the position and order of the subject, object and verbs in the sentences.

This accouts for the debate in the first place. Detractors have accurately noticed that Yoda's speaking patterns do indeed change in the newer films and are less grammatically correct. However, the other side is also correct in their assertion that there is not a gigantic difference in the frequency or amount of inverted lines overall. However, the latter camp has made one mistake, and this is looking at the matter in the simpler manner that Drew Stewart initially took when organizing his spreadsheet; with a fuller examination of the grammar we find real differences within the "odd" sounding lines, and this is where the real PT-OT difference lies. Let's look at these.

After reviewing Empire Strikes Back , linguist Tim MacSaveny noticed that Yoda makes errors common for non-native speakers of English, specifically in the way he inverts the word order to object-subject-verb, "which," MacSaveny says, "while very uncommon in languages of the Earth, is possible." He continues: "It is almost universally dispreferred to put object before subject, but some very few languages in South America do it, and marked forms of some other languages (like Mandarin) do it. Presumably, Yoda's native tongue (is there a name for this yet? If not, I may call it "Yodish", or perhaps "Dagobarista") has an OSV word order, and he is accidentally code-switching."

He also made this list of observations where Yoda makes grammatical choices either unusual or incorrect in modern English.

Temporal adverbs: are placed sentence-initial, sentence-medial, sentence final, and in their proper place.

Auxiliary verbs: Placed inconsistently or left out (especially with "do")

Negatives placed word finally: this is okay in archaic English, as in "size matters not"

Equative clauses are almost always structured OVS (with O being the predicate complement)

Possible hypothesis for future study -- Is Yoda employing topic and focus (as per Halliday, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic%E2%80%93comment for a primer)

This is an interesting analysis, but it doesn't quite help us in the subject of this article: how does his speech pattern change for the second trilogy? After watching both Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones , MacSaveny came to an interesting conclusion:

"I've found two interesting linguistic deviations between Original Trilogy Yoda and Prequel Yoda.