>
> Okay, I stand corrected. At least one other Indo-European
language, Danish, has examples of originally rhyming words undergoing
divergent phonological developments. Thank you for pointing this out
to me, I was not familiar with the Danish language beyond some
knowledge of its ancestor and its membership in the Germanic language
family. I suppose any language could have developed as bizarrely (my
opinion) as English did, just happens to be English that has a high
number of these peculiarities, as well as a very inconsistent
spelling and pronunciation system and a predominantly foreign
vocabulary. But the same things could have happened in Danish or
Dutch or Russian, I guess, only they didn't, not to the same extent
anyway, though Danish does have some similar examples. Unless you
now come up with some ten or more further examples of these phenomena
in Danish!
Don't even get me started. And the percentage of Low German loanwords
in the Continental Scandinavian languages gets close to the
percentage of French loanwords in English.
Torsten