McDonald's Minionese: WTF?

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As a tie-in with Minions the movie, McDonald's is giving out a dozen different Minions toys with Happy Meals. Like the Minions in the movie, the toys speak the invented language "Minionese" — though you have to bump or hit the toys to get them to respond. The response to this marketing initiative has been dominated by the fact that one of them, the caveman Minion, seems to many people to be saying "What the fuck" and "Well I'll be damned":

(Audio from here.)

A small sample of the coverage: Nancy Kaffer, "Baby's first f-bomb? Thanks, Minions!", Detroit Free Press, 7/10/2015; Chris Isidore, "WTF? Parents say McDonald's Minion toys are cursing", CNN Money 7/10/2015; Suzanna Kim, "Parents Debate Whether McDonald's Minions Happy Meal Toy Curses", ABC News 7/10/2015; "Why toy 'Minion' curse words might just all be in your head", AP 7/10/2015; "'WTF': 'Swearing' McDonald's 'Minions' Happy Meal toy to stay", TVNZ 7/10/2015; "McDonald's: We swear those 'Minions' aren't swearing", Fox News 7/10/2015; Ben Klayman, "McDonald's stand by 'cursing' Happy Meal Minions", Sidney Morning Herald 7/11/2015.

According to the last of those stories,

The little yellow Minion characters speak a nonsense language and McDonald's Corp. said the Minion Caveman toy makes three sounds – "ha ha ha," "para la bukay," and "eh eh."

Some discussion of Minionese, which implies that it's a sort of free-form mixture of various European languages, along with a sizeable dose of ham, is here.  I've removed the embedded version because there seems to be no way to prevent it from autoplaying — but here's the discussion of origins:

"Pierre" is Pierre-Louis Coffin. I haven't  been able to find out whether someone made up the mixture, or if Coffin just improvises what seems to be a sort of Hollywood version of the language of the rather minion-esque Salvatore in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose:

When I learned later about his adventurous life and about the various places where he had lived, putting down roots in none of them, I realized Salvatore spoke all languages, and no language. Or, rather, he had invented for himself a language which used the sinews of the languages to which he had been exposed— and once I thought that his was, not the Adamic language that a happy mankind had spoken, all united by a single tongue from the origin of the world to the Tower of Babel, or one of the languages that arose after the dire event of their division, but precisely the Babelish language of the first day after the divine chastisement, the language of primeval confusion.

Here's how Salvatore is described:

Unlike many of my brothers, I have never in my whole life been visited by the Devil; but I believe that if he were to appear to me one day, he would have the very features of our interlocutor. His head was hairless, not shaved in penance but as the result of the past action of some viscid eczema; the brow was so low that if he had had hair on his head it would have mingled with his eyebrows (which were thick and shaggy); the eyes were round, with tiny mobile pupils, and whether the gaze was innocent or malign I could not tell: perhaps it was both, in different moods, in flashes. The nose could not be called a nose, for it was only a bone that began between the eyes, but as it jutted from his forehead it immediately sank back, transforming itself only into two dark holes, broad nostrils thick with hair. The mouth, joined to the nose by a scar, was wide and ill-made, stretching more to the right than to the left, and between the upper lip, nonexistent, and the lower, prominent and fleshy, there protruded, in an irregular pattern, black teeth sharp as a dog’s.

Definitely minion material, though not for the preschool set. The book's first example of Salvatore's "Babelish language", in William Weaver's English translation:

“Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! Death is super nos! Pray the Santo Pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! Ha ha, you like this negromanzia de Domini Nostri Jesu Christi! Et anco jois m’es dols e plazer m’es dolors.  .  .  . Cave el diabolo! Semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. But Salvatore is not stupidus! Bonum monasterium, and aquí refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. And the resto is not worth merda. Amen. No?”

Or in Eco's original Italian, courtesy of several commenters:

"Penitenziagite! Vide quando draco venturus est a rodegarla l'anima tua! La mortz est super nos! Prega che vene lo papa santo a liberar nos a malo de todas le peccata! Ah ah, ve piase ista negromanzia de Domini Nostri Iesu Christi! Et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors… Cave el diabolo! Semper m'aguaita in qualche canto per adentarme le carcagna. Ma Salvatore non est insipiens! Bonum monasterium, et aqui se magna et se priega dominum nostrum. Et el resto valet un figo seco. Et amen. No?"

[It occurs to me that another possible model is Dario Fo's Grammelot — see "Gibberish by any other name", 3/11/2005; "Fo did it", 3/19/2005; "Maybe Jacques Lecoq did it", 12/8/206.]

Meanwhile, Minions the movie is setting box-office records, and I'll bet that for every lost Happy Meal customer, there are three others lining up to get a caveman.

My own evaluation? The caveman Minion will be joining Lady Mondegreen and all those lonely Starbucks lovers as a classic classroom example for the top-down aspects of human speech perception.



19 Comments

  1. K Chang said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 8:54 am

    Observation-expectancy effect at work. People who were constantly exposed to swear words and expect to hear swear words hear swear words, even from nonsensical mutterings. It's just backmasking, except there's nothing being played backwards.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect

    [(myl) This is too glib. The fact that perception is Bayesian inference does mean that there's an expectation-based aspect along with a signal-based aspect. But people don't ordinarily hear (or see) everything as everything, and the people who hear the caveman minion saying "What the fuck" didn't expect that from a children's toy. What they hear has the right number of syllables, the right timing, and the right spectral energy concentrations:

    It's lo-fi enough to support any percept that fits its salient properties — but no one is going to hear it as "you deserve a break today" or I'm lovin' it" or "fair and balanced" or "just do it" or any of innumerable other common phrases that DON'T fit the pattern.]

  2. Jim M. said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 9:08 am

    Minionese has a number of Indonesian phrases in it. Coffin's mother is a well-known Indonesian novelist, and this has been getting a good deal of coverage in Indonesian media.

  3. Brian said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 11:09 am

    Though don't let us forget that the example passage of Salvatore's speech was actually written by William Weaver, the English translator of Eco's original Itlalian novel.

    [(myl) True enough. But I don't own the Italian version, Il nome della rosa — if you do, can you quote the original Italianate Babelish?]

  4. BobC said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 12:34 pm

    I get the "ha ha ha" part, but I'll be damned if I can hear "para la bukay," even when I know that's what he's (supposed to be) saying. I'd like to hear how it sounds in the movie.

  5. Yakusa Cobb said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 2:57 pm

    I don't own the Italian version

    Nor do I, but a duckduckgo search for '"nome della rosa" penitenziagite draco' finds this:

    Penitenziagite! Vide quando draco venturus est a rodegarla l'anima tua! La mortz est super nos! Prega che vene lo papa santo a liberar nos a malo de todas le peccata! Ah ah, ve piase ista negromanzia de Domini Nostri Ieus Christi! Et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors.. Cave el diabolo! Semper m'aguaita in qualche canto per adentarme le carcagna. Ma Salvatore non est insipiens! Bonum monasterium, et aqui se magna et se priega dominum nostrum. Et el resto valet un figo seco. Et amen. No

  6. bulbul said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 3:05 pm

    From the 1989 Bonpiani edition of "Il nome della rosa":

    L'uomo sorrise (o almeno così credetti) e levando il dito come per ammonire, disse:
    "Penitenziagite! Vide quando draco venturus est a rodegarla l'anima tua! La mortz est super nos! Prega che vene lo papa santo a liberar nos a malo de todas le peccata! Ah ah, ve piase ista negromanzia de Domini Nostri Iesu Christi! Et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors… Cave el diabolo! Semper m'aguaita in qualche canto per adentarme le carcagna. Ma Salvatore non est insipiens! Bonum monasterium, et aqui se magna et se priega dominum nostrum. Et el resto valet un figo seco. Et amen. No?"

    I'm not sure about "mortz", there is a speck over the word in my copy, but that's what it looks like, plus it seems suitably occitan, so let's go with that.

  7. Q. Pheevr said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 3:06 pm

    “Penitenziagite! Vide quando draco venturus est a rodegarla l'anima tua! La mortz est super nos! Prega che vene lo papa santo a liberar nos a malo de todas le peccata! Ah ah, ve piase ista negomanzia de Domini Nostri Iesu Christi! Et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors… Cave el diabolo! Semper m'aguaita in qualche canto per adentarme le cargagna. Ma Salvatore non est insipiens! Bonum monasterium, et aqui se magna et se priega dominum nostrum. Et el resto valet un figo seco. Et amen. No?”

  8. Q. Pheevr said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 3:08 pm

    I should have known two other people would post that in the time it took me to copy it out. Sorry for the redundancy!

  9. Guy said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 3:31 pm

    I the allegedly "well I'll be damned" one as something like [ɑːβideə] does that seem about right to anyone else?

  10. Stephen Hart said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 4:30 pm

    A nice followup to Mark Liberman's Mr. Finch post of July 11.

  11. John said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 5:37 pm

    I don't understand Brian's assertion that the translated Eco text was "actually written" by the translator. To me that implies he composed the original text (rather that working from Eco's), but Eco's Italian text is very clearly the source for the original. Doesn't the idea of translation in this context essentially imply that the translator wrote the actual translated words while still working from a source?

    My rudimentary (and rusty) Italian tells me it's a relatively close translation, too, although I don't quite follow why "Et el resto valet un figo seco." is translated as "And the resto is not worth merda." Anyone have insight into that? I have a feeling it's slang but can't find any confirmation, excepting the related-but-different word "figa."

  12. phspaelti said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 8:05 pm

    Another predecessor to this kind of thing is the language in "Pingu" back from the 1980s.
    (See e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJlWLVgozVs)

  13. M Harrison said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 8:29 pm

    I notice that it sounds a lot less like WTF if I cut out the initial thump that makes it start talking. It could be that we're biased toward hearing WTF because that's a commonly heard expression after an unexpected sudden noise.

    Perhaps if they added a small delay between hitting the toy and the audio starting to play, people would perceive it very differently.

    Japanese also has the /fu/ syllable, which is like a mix of F and H.

  14. Geof said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 8:49 pm

    Oh good, another one for the same list that has "the Teletubby toy that says an f-word for homosexuals except is actually saying the Cantonese 'fai-di' (hurry) because the voice actress speaks the language."

  15. James said,

    July 12, 2015 @ 11:10 pm

    Diego Marani's Europanto, entertainingly employed in his detective novel Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot, seems worth mentioning here.

  16. Stan Carey said,

    July 13, 2015 @ 6:16 am

    Out of context I wouldn't have perceived the sounds as swearing, but when primed to do so it's a lot easier to make the leap.
    Kory Stamper at Strong Language has further discussion of the Minion and other 'swearing' toys.

  17. Adam F said,

    July 14, 2015 @ 3:27 am

    Are there any statistics on how common it is for random words in one language to sound like rude words in some other?

  18. Rodger C said,

    July 14, 2015 @ 3:29 pm

    This reminds me of the preacher some 30 years ago who claimed that when you played the theme song to Mr. Ed (a 60s sitcom about a talking horse) backwards, it said "Someone sung this song for Satan." All Things Considered covered this with a sound clip. I, of course, knew the Mr. Ed theme by heart, so I wrote it out backwards in IPA. It turned out to be "That is, of course, unless the horse."

  19. Chas Belov said,

    July 25, 2015 @ 12:50 am

    Then there's the delightful song Prisencolinensinainciusol, which, come to think of it, I believe I first learned about on Language Log.

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