Of mynas and miners, bells and whistles

Over at Spicks & Specks, Greg Pringle has a virtuoso post on "The Bell Miner:  How orthography and ornithology catalysed a new folk etymology" (8/9/15).  It's about an Australian honeyeating bird — Manorina melanophrys — that used to be called the Bellbird, but was renamed Bell Miner through association with the South Asian bird called in Hindi the mainā मैना (" starling").

As Greg explains:

For a long time there was no single way of spelling this word. People wrote it as they felt fit, resulting in a variety of 19th-century spellings like “minah”, “minor”, “minar”, and “miner”. The principle behind these spellings was that of representing the pronunciation roughly as it was heard.

If these spellings appear peculiar today, it's because number of them reflect a sound change that took place in southern British English during the 18th century. This involved the disappearance of /r/ from any environment in which it wasn't followed by a vowel. Sounds spelt ‘er’ , ‘ur’ , ‘ar’ , ‘or’, and ‘ir’ in the middle of words turned into long vowels, and sounds written ‘-er’, ‘-ar’, and ‘-or’ at the end of words usually turned into the vague vowel known as schwa. Varieties of English that adopted this change in pronunciation are now called “non-rhotic”; those that preserve the /r/ are called “rhotic”.

This sound change led to a reinterpretation of the function of ‘r’ in spelling. In the middle of words it was seen as a sign of lengthening, and at the end of words it was interpreted as schwa. This is why many of the 19th-century spelling pronunciations of “mynah” end with an unpronounced ‘r’.

…

Interestingly, this ornithological name kept the spelling “miner”, despite the fact that both “minah” and “mynah” were current during the 19th century and were used for both the miners and the bellbird. The spelling “miner” would have encountered little resistance in Australia, which was a fortress of non-rhoticism. Until well into the 20th century, Australians continued to use ‘r’ to represent impressionistic colloquial pronunciations, without necessarily involving any actual /r/ sound. When authors wanted to represent the way people actually spoke, it was accepted practice to write “to go” as “ter go” or “talked and laughed” as "torked an' larft" [5]. This can still be found up to the present time.

But there are inherent problems with this “pronunciation-based” spelling. The first is that, while it may have looked fine to Englishmen or Australians, it makes less sense to speakers of other varieties of English where the letter ‘r’ is actually pronounced. Such “rhotic” varieties are spoken in places like Scotland, Ireland, regional areas of England, and much of the United States and Canada. For such speakers, there is an audible and meaningful difference in pronunciation between “myna” /ˈmaɪnə/ and “miner” /ˈmaɪnər/. The first could only be applied to the bird, the second, in ordinary pronunciation, would normally be used only in words like “minor” and “miner”.

The problem is not confined to rhotic speakers. Although it is generally understood that alphabetic systems are based on the equation of letters to sounds (often observed in the breach in English spelling), spellings have a propensity to become fixed, and in their fixity come to be regarded as invariant manifestations of words rather than direct representations of sound. Even in non-rhotic English, the old fluidity of spelling by which Hindi मैना mainā was spelt “minah”, "minor”, “minar”, or “miner”, eventually settled on “mynah”, and finally “myna”. In the world of fixed spellings, “miner” is tightly linked to the concept of “mining”, “minor” is tightly linked to the concept of “lesser” or “younger”, and “myna” or “mynah” is tightly linked to a type of bird. Once spellings are fixed, the older practice of using “miner” to represent the pronunciation /ˈmaɪnə/ in an ad hoc fashion is easily overlooked or forgotten. This is what has happened to the spelling “miner” for these honeyeaters. It is now difficult to see the word as related to anything other than mining, opening the way for “miner” to be interpreted in a completely different manner from what was originally intended.

To be fair, of course, the connection with the old meaning is not yet completely dead. There is still some awareness of the roots of “miner”, and some Internet sites even give “Bell Mynah” as an alternative to Bell Miner. But in general the spelling “miner” serves to distract contemporary English speakers from the intended meaning.

Greg's argumentation is backed up by OED (myna, n.; miner, n.³) and Hobson-Jobson, which suggest that miner was originally a variant of myna(h), referring to the S/SE Asian bird, appearing that way in Raffles' History of Java (1817). (We've talked about similar non-rhotic pronunciation spellings on Language Log many times, e.g. Burma, Myanmar, and Eeyore.) Before the name miner was applied to what was formerly called the Bellbird, it had already been attached to another Australian honeyeater, Manorina melanocephala.

I'll end this post on the same note as Greg does his, by pointing out how the Chinese have translated the "miner" of "Bell Miner" as kuàngniǎo 矿鸟 ("mining bird" or "mineral bird"), whereas the myna has been known in China since the Tang period (618-907) as the bāgē(r) 八哥(儿).

[Thanks to Ben Zimmer]