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>.

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.