> I forgot (inattentive me) about the just-introduced Danish examples.
Are there many more Danish examples of divergent developments of the
same vowel, apparently for no reason? Maybe comparison of the English
examples with any Danish examples might uncover good reasons for this
phenomenon.
>
>
The thing you're looking for is dialect/sociolect mixing. That took
place even in German, cf. the many Low German words in Modern German.
If one chooses not to look at them as Low German loans, they become
examples of erratic and incomprensible development from Proto-Germanic
of the type you claim is characteristic of English. Also the many
Nordwestblock loans in (West-)Germanic are, if not seen as loans, just
examples of erratic phonetic deveopment.
Torsten