What would Noam Chomsky think about the linguistic development of Baby Yoda?

It's frankly shocking that in more than 40 years since Yoda first debuted on the big screen, no one has asked the anarcho-linguist Noam Chomsky to explain the Jedi's syntactical idiosyncrasies. But now that Baby Yoda has stolen everyone's heart, someone has finally taken him to task.

Or, well, maybe.

Im thinking it, youre thinking it, what will Baby Yoda sound like when he utters his first words? #babyyoda @Disney @jonfavs #noamchomsky pic.twitter.com/Z8MjztA86T

— Jessica Yu (@jessicayutweets) December 3, 2019

Given the fact that this is the first tweet from the account, I sadly suspect that this isn't real. I even messaged the woman who wrote it for verification, but she didn't respond. A quick Google search reveals that thereis a Jessica Yu in Australia who is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. If it is the same Jessica Yu from Australia, and this turns out to just be a fun creative writing experimentwell then hey, good on her. She captured Chomsky's voice here impressively well, along with his well-documented disdain for humans projecting linguistic meaning onto Koko the gorilla. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure that "'No thoughts on memes' Noam Chomsky" is poised to become a meme now on its own.

Image via Wikimedia Commons, altered.

  Read the rest