OK, so what’s that first G doing there?
Isn’t ‘island’ auge and not gauge?
Doesn’t gauge mean ‘region’ or ‘area’?
Well, yes to the last two questions, and the two words are not related.
The mysterious G in the compound is left over from a very early sound change of w → ɡ, which tells us that this was probably a calque from Latin into Griutungi or Late East Germanic, entering the language sometime prior to 900ᴀᴅ as *nēhwuwawi or something similar. Any later, and we would likely have gotten something like **nēfurauge or **nēfauge.
As for why reconstructed Gritungi *awi doesn’t match reconstructed Gothic *awja, that’s a little more speculative, but one of the few differences between Gothic and reconstructed Griutungi is that the latter had some different mechanisms for how glides (W and J) function in words – particularly when they’re part of the ending – and in this case, the later forms of the word auge require that the Griutungi form came from an earlier form of *awijō rather than *awjō. It’s harder to say what the Gothic might have been, because there are no reflexes of the ‑awjō stems in the language, but based on how other similar words have evolved, it likely would not have taken on this “long-form” ending.
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