gurrawaŋ

Currawong is one of those borrowings that hardly pretends to be anything else. English took it from Dharug and nearby Aboriginal forms recorded around early colonial Sydney, where the bird's ringing call made the name sound almost self-explanatory. The earliest written records appear in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Colonists heard the bird, wrote the word badly, and kept it anyway.

The transformation was mostly orthographic. Aboriginal phonology was pushed through English ears and pens, producing spellings such as currawang and currawong before the modern form stabilized. That instability is normal in colonial records. The language was not unclear. The listeners were.

As English spread across southeastern Australia, currawong became the standard common name for several related birds of the genus Strepera. The borrowed word generalized beyond the exact community where it was first heard. This is one of the common thefts of settler language: take a local name, stretch it over a larger map.

Today currawong is thoroughly Australian English, but the word still carries its Aboriginal origin in every awkward consonant cluster English never would have invented on its own. It names a bird famous for its voice and thefts from nests. The word was stolen too. It still sings.