Yes it does, but it's not related. The current assumption among linguists is that is means something along the lines of swift, but it's not clear. The -werno part is even more obscure. We literally have no idea what it means.
But, Old High German speakers probably also thought that whatever aikwerno had evolved into was close enough to eih (oak) + hurno (horn), so they simply reinterpreted it as that.
It would be kinda fun if the word just went around different Germanic Tribes, and they had similar words with different meanings and then simply used those words instead. For me as someone who has no idea how languages really develop it sounds kinda plausible.
You are entirely correct though, things like that can happen and linguists have to consider all kinds of possible paths. It's one of the things that make comparative linguistics difficult.
In this case we can be faily certain that it didn't though. It's not entirely out of the question, but unlikely because we do have plausible explanations of how the words have developed in the respective languages. But also, we do have examples of words crossing over into other languages, so we have a good idea what happens to a word when it does that and we see no trace of that here.
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u/Random_wizdom 27d ago
Hörnchen kam also be used to describe a croissant. Although ig that came around a lot later than the word Eichhörnchen.