Re: [tied] Oddity of English

tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

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.

-- So then the most reasonable explanation for the divergent developments of Old English vowels to modern English vowels is dialect/sociolect mixing.  What fools me is that in German Low German is so obviously different from High German since the consonants are unshifted and the Great Vowel Shift did not occur in Low German, whereas in English the dialects and sociolects are much more similar at the outset at least, and it's hard to pin down and document which one is responsible for "break" vs. "leak", etc.  I remember looking at dialect atlases with vowel characteristics, but I can't remember any dialects where shortening of *a: as in "hot", "cloth", "gone", "shone" is a regular feature of that dialect, nor where the ME diphthong ei regularly became /i:/ as in "weak".  But perhaps my memory is bad.  Unfortunately, I have only read about sociolectal differences anecdotally, not in comprehensive studies, especially not in any seeking to explain erratic vowel developments in English.  So my mind is not really alert to this explanation, and the origins are not as clear-cut as Low German vs. High German, so it's all very hazy, I think.

But even though I consider myself as having read a great deal more about the Germanic languages than the average person, I to my consternation am unfamiliar with the idea of the "Nordwestblock".  Are these words that are hypothesized as coming from a pre-Germanic substratum of non-IE origin?  Or something else, or something similar?

 

Andrew