More precisely, *aujo: 'island' is most likely a substantivised form
of the adjective *auja- 'watery', which is derived from the "water"
root *axW- via Verner's law and consonant lenition (*agW-ja- > *aWja-
). What I meant is that the presence of reflexes of *axW- in Finnish
doesn't prove that the early Baltic Finnic speakers were familiar
with an early version of Eysysla, or with the "island" word, or
with "sysla" in isolation, or that they were in contact with speakers
(particularly) of ("Proto"-)Danish. Actually, awjo 'island'
reportedly exists in Saami, but this again only means that the early
Saami were in touch with some group of Proto-Germanic speakers.
Bu the way, since we've been talking of Occam's Razor: although
*aujo: is not directly attested in Gothic (if we ignore the so-so
possibility that gawi 'region' derives from ga-aujo:), we
nevertheless don't hesitate to reconstruct it for Proto-Germanic
since there *is* some extra support for such a reconstruction. A
purely NWGermanic derivative would be too late to have undergone
Verner's Law. Such additional arguments must of course be taken into
account, and if we agree that the NWGermanic word is related to pre-
Germanic *akWa:, its Proto-Germanic origin becomes a necessity.
Piotr
--- In cybalist@..., tgpedersen@... wrote:
> I'm not sure I follow your reasoning there. Please explain? As I
have
> understood it *ahwia- is a derivation of *ahwa-?
>
> Torsten