This week’s final installment of the "Star Wars" franchise is not only the end of a cinematic era. The completion of George Lucas’ second trilogy will be the last hurrah for one of the most grammatically eclectic film characters of all time: Yoda.

From the moment Yoda first appeared in "The Empire Strikes Back" in 1980 — assuring Luke Skywalker, "Help you I can," and warning him, "If once you start down the dark path ... consume you it will" —Yoda caught our attention with his unique syntax, or system of word order.

Geoffrey Pullum, linguist and co-author of the "Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" (Cambridge University Press, $160), can explain Yoda’s strange way of speaking. His analysis may bring back some bad blackboard memories, but it goes to show that anyone can learn grammar with Yoda as teacher.

Take a look at this Yoda sentence from "Empire Strikes Back": "Through the Force, things you will see."

To hear Pullum tell it, this sentence is a galactic grammatical feat. That’s because it places the object of the sentence ("things") before the subject ("you"). In English and many other languages, the more natural word order would be, "You will see things."

On the lookout

Even before Yoda arrived on the silver screen, Pullum was keeping an eye out for this kind of sentence structure — which linguists call "object-initial" clauses — in human languages.

"Until 1977, I would have said that no human language used that as the typical order of constituents in an ordinary, unembellished clause with no special emphasis effects. In fact I did say so, in print in 1976," Pullum writes by e-mail.

Later in the decade, Pullum discovered some obscure languages in South America that appeared to regularly use object-initial clauses, but those languages are exceptions. So whether he realized it or not, George Lucas stumbled upon a grammatical stroke of genius with Yoda’s word order.

"The one thing you could do to make your syntax seem quite strange to almost all the six billion people on this planet, no matter which of the 6,000 languages they spoke, would be to adopt [object-initial] order as the normal order of declarative clauses," Pullum said.

Yoda is actually a syntactical switch-hitter, alternating among object-initial sentences ("Rootleaf I cook"), subject-initial sentences ("A Jedi’s strength flows from the Force"), and sentence fragments ("No different! Only different in your mind.")

Sometimes you will hear Yoda start a sentence with the kind of adjective grammar textbooks call a subject complement, as in "Strong is Vader," or he will separate helping verbs from main verbs, as in "Help you I can."

"English allows this possibility but doesn’t use it very often," Pullum says. "Yoda uses it at the drop of a hat."

When English speakers use this inverted word order, it’s usually for special emphasis or rhetorical effect. They might say, "One thing I know ..." instead of "I know one thing" or "Here I am" instead of "I am here." So Yoda’s syntax could be a way to make him sound sophisticated, as well as extraterrestrial, says Mark Peters, who writes about language for Verbatim and The Vocabula Review and keeps a Weblog on words www.wordlust.blogspot.com).

`Musical chairs’

"In addition to making him sound like Kermit the Frog crossed with a fortune cookie, these Yodaisms mirror how Luke’s world is being turned upside down (at times, literally, with the help of Jedi levitation)," Peters writes by e-mail. "If a green Muppet living in a swamp can be as smart and powerful as Yoda, and a mass murderer like Darth Vader can be Luke’s (eventually) redeemable daddy, then maybe subjects, verbs and objects can play musical chairs too."

Peters adds that Yoda’s name is itself notable to word watchers. He says "Yoda" is entering English as, in his words, "a synonym for teacher, mentor, and all-around ... wise person."

"On `Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ Spike the Vampire says of older vampire Angel, `You were my Yoda!’" Peters says.

"I’ve complimented several excellent teachers I’ve known by calling them `my Yoda’ too, and I don’t think Spike and I are the only ones. I predict more dictionaries will get with it and include `Yoda’ in the future."