Re: [tied] Oddity of English

Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

Richard Wordingham wrote:

>>Don't be too sure of anything. OE a: is irregularly reflected as "short
>>O" in <gone> and <shone>, and of course in several compounds where the
>>shortening goes back to Middle English, such as <holiday> and <bonfire>.
>

Another well-known example of OE a: > Mod.E "short O" is cloth < cla:þ,
cf. the regular reflex of OE a: in <clothes>. <groat> also had a variant
with a short vowel (in addition to /O:/ and /ou/) a few centuries ago,
as indicated by early spellings like <grotte>.

-- Can't say anything in my defense, you really got me there, I, a native English speaker, really couldn't manage to remember "gone" and "shone" and "cloth" and "holiday" as other examples of *a: > "short o" besides "hot".  But the more examples there are, the more I wonder: why?  What reason is there for these manifold developments of a single vowel (these and the other examples like "broad" and "great" and "weak" and "threat" and all the rest), something which recurs relatively frequently, in my impression, in English.  Are other IE languages similar in this respect?

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