Where do Modern English dash and squash come from?

Looking up the respective entries in the OED and Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (and in almost all other big dictionaries - including the unabridged American ones), the user is told that dash goes back to or is, at least related to, dialectal Danish daske, Swedish daska 'to beat, slap', an etymology which cannot be allowed to stand because of formal, semantic and chronological grounds. More than 30 years ago, a German scholar, Helmut Lüdtke, proposed a viable and convincing alternative: namely Anglo-French dachier, which fits the English loan verb both in form and meaning.

For the verb squash, however, a Romance origin had been suggested, namely Old French esquasser, which indeed fits the meaning but not the form of the English verb. Dialects outside the Paris region (the so-called Ile de France) had the variant esquachier which exactly yields the correct form. In this case, consonantal alternations within Old French dialects, including the medieval French spoken in England after 1066, the so-called Anglo-French, had rarely been taken into account.

Earlier scholars had preferred to look for an etymology on the continent, thus neglecting the rich Anglo-French heritage, but recent scholarship has shown that consonantal, vocalic, and dialectal alternations found in Old French dialects should be taken into account. Thus Modern English annoy reflects the so-called weak form (i.e., the variants of the present indicative of the French verb which were stressed on the ending) of Anglo-French anoier.

Modern French ennuyer owes its vocalism to the so-called strong forms (i.e. those variants of the present indicative of the French verb which were stressed on the root syllable). The English verbs catch (< Anglo-French cachier) and chase (< Central French chasser) reflect a well-known example of consonantal alternation in the source language.

The noun prey continues Anglo-French preie,as compared to Central French proie, while the adjective coy shows the Central French vocalism oi, as compared to ei in Anglo-French quei of the same meaning. The verbs coil (a rope) and moil (as found in toil and moil) on the one hand and cull (select, mull over) on the other hand reflect divergent developments within Anglo-French.

Such dialectal and morphonological alternations found in medieval French borrowings will taken into account in the course of the revision of the OED etymologies.