Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A cartoon on George Takei’s website, passed on by Susan Fischer and Asya Pereltsvaig:

The cartoon is from German cartoonist and illustrator Miguel Fernandez (German Wikipedia entry here). This one works because the initials on the tombstone can be taken to represent Latin words from a familiar Latin expression; it’s I P R in English as well, but would be I F R in German.

That’s Requiescat in Pace in Latin, Rest in Peace in English, Ruhe in Frieden in German. But this is Yoda, of “Why backwards talk Yoda?” fame (summary of postings up through 2007 here). As I understand these things, In Pace Requiescat would not be at all notable, but In Peace Rest is very peculiar — and Yoda did his backwards-talk in a form of English, after all.

This entry was posted on December 4, 2012 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Syntax, Word order. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.