This exact homophony caught me out when I was living in Australia: I first heard the name "noisy miner" verbally, and simply assumed it was a non-rhotic pronunciation of "noisy myna" for some time until I actually looked it up. (I did know they were different species and could identify them as such, being familiar with mynas from Hawaii, and noisy miners from the pair that made a nest in my front yard and proceeded to dive bomb me for two months whenever I set foot outside my door.)Rerun commentary: I recently saw a video about how to tell the difference between a noisy miner (an Australian native bird) and a common myna (an introduced pest species here in Australia, with some similarities in appearance and habits and an often overlapping range within large cities).[1] The most interesting thing to me about the video was all the comments from American viewers who thought it was weird that the Australian video presenter pronounced "myna" and "miner" identically, which kept confusing them.
So, the Wikipedia page on rhoticity in English only talks about rhoticity in terms of non-rhotic accents dropping r sounds in certain words. But this example isn't about dropping an r, it's about adding one ("myna" becoming "myner" *). Does that also fall under the concept of rhoticity, or does it have a separate name?One of the major, if not the major, distinctions between different English accents is rhoticity. This is whether or not you pronounce the letter "r" when it is not followed by a vowel sound.
*Actually, why isn't it the reverse, and "miner" pronounced like "minah"? Since the r isn't followed by a vowel…
Statistics: Posted by Philadelphus — 14 Oct 2024 01:27