erne

What do ernes, crows, finches, wrens, owls, and sparrows have in common (besides feathers and beaks and other avian traits)? Wing your way through one thousand years of ornithological and etymological history, and you will alight on an Old English lexicon wherein these birds had basically the same names as they have now. Their names were spelled a little differently back then: "earn," "crāwe," "finc," "wrenna," "Ūle," and "spearwa." All those avian names are also birds of a feather in that their ancestors are akin to Old High German words: arn, "krāwa," "fincho," "rentilo," "uwila," and "sparo," respectively.