Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 January 26

= January 26 =

Do the words miner and myna have any realation.
Background: I live in Sydney, Australia, where the endemic noise miner, and the imported Indian myna both serve as irritating alarm clocks, until today I thought that both species were "miners".

I'm just wondering if the two names are related, or are these birds as different as night and day.

Thanks --TheTomorrow (talk) 08:51, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Our article on Manorina says that "The name "miner" derives from a mid 19th century re-spelling of the Hindi name "myna", which they resemble, but was not formally adopted until the early 20th century" (with a source). Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:08, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Note that the Australian miners are not anything like closely related to the Mynas which are members of "the starling family (Sturnidae)... native to southern Asia, especially India, Pakistan and Bangladesh", they have just borrowed the name. In much the same way, the Australian magpie is only very distantly related to the Eurasian magpie. This is why we need Latin binomial nomenclature. Alansplodge (talk) 17:21, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * This happened many places all over the world; when Europeans encountered new flora and fauna across the world in their explorations, they sometimes asked native people what they were called (for example, the Virginia opossum, the original source of the name was a local native word) but often they just used a word they were familiar with they had used to describe what they thought was a similar animal, but which was only tenuously related to the animal in question. That's how we get such things as the North American buzzard being entirely unrelated to the Eurasian buzzards, or the Old World porcupine being mostly unrelated to the New World porcupines.  -- Jayron 32 13:13, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The word "opossum" is an interesting example, because in Australia it somehow lost its first letter and turned into "possum" to describe a very diverse group of only slightly related marsupials, because some of them look like north American opossums. HiLo48 (talk) 21:59, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * "Possum" is what most folks who don't happen to be zoologists call opossums, Stateside. --Trovatore (talk) 22:47, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * And what many Australian mums call their kids. (Isn't that right, Peter Costello? - ) --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:51, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * It's also the very public name of a sadly deceased New Zealand rally driver - Possum Bourne. He got the name for once crashing his mother's car while trying to avoid a possum on the road. Trying to avoid a possum on the road is close to a crime in New Zealand. The creatures are not highly regarded there. HiLo48 (talk) 23:25, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Also the nickname for the (also sadly deceased) American country music singer George Jones, said to be inspired by the shape of his nose. Personally, I don't see it. --Khajidha (talk) 10:30, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Some better pics in Google Images make it clearer. Though it's still a stretch. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:12, 29 January 2020 (UTC)