374 S Mutter NOTES ON KLUGE'S AND WEIGAND'S ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARIES I 1. ON THE ETYMOLOGY or MODERN ENGLISH Awl On A hie l an ein Heft befestigter stahlerner Stachel zum Vor- stechen bei Lederarbeit' the 5th edition of Weigand has this to say: "Aus mhd die, ahd. dlaf.; dazu ndl. aal, ags. od f. (daneben dwel, engl. awl), an. air m. 'Ahle.' Eine W eiterbildung zeigt ahd. alansa (daher schweiz.-schwab. Alse), vgl. frz. atene aus alesne und ndl. els f. 'Ahle.' Verglichen wird aind fir a f. 'Pfriem^ Ahle,' lit. ila, preuss. yla, lett. Hens 'Ahle.' In this account several statements need correction. In the first place, as the NED very properly points out, the length of vowel in the Old Germanic languages is by no means established. Old High German alansa, alunsa 1 speaks for OHG. ala, MHG. ale. As to Old English, the corresponding word has undoubtedly the vowel short and its gender is just as undoubtedly masculine, as Napier has emphasized. Nowhere is there any basis for the assumption of feminine gender and the forms recorded are <zl, eal, al. The latter resulted in an alle (1382, Wyclif Exodus XXI. 6); the edition of 1388 has a nal, an al. This spelling varied later with aul (1607, Topsell, Four-footed Beasts 144), awl, (1727, Swift, Gulliver II VI.145) and has now become the established spelling, so as to distinguish it from the adjective all with which it perfectly coincides in pronunciation. The spelling awl has given rise to misconnecting the word with OE. dwel, dwul with which it has nothing whatever to do as I have pointed out in Anglia some years ago, and I am happy to say the noted linguist, Prof. Evald Liden of Goteburg fully agrees with me. In the first place, OE. dwel is never used to interpret Latin subula; it glosses either fuscinula or harpago or tridens or ungula or uncus. In the second place, OE. dwel could never have resulted in modern awl. Ernest Zupitza, in his Germanische Gutturale page 63, realized that and therefore assumed the a of OE. dwel as being short. But his assumption is shown to be wrong by the fact that the OE. word appears, in accordance with a well-known phonetic law, as owel in early Middle English,
1 Cp. NED. sub alsene and elsin.
