Brian M. Scott wrote:
>>If PWGmc */a/ > early OE /æ/, then were did OE /a/ come
>>from?
>
>
> So-called restoration of [A]: stressed /æ/ was retracted to
> /a/ (realized as [A]) before a back vowel in the following
> syllable.
The fronting of PWGmc. *a > *æ affected Old English as well as Old
Frisian and is known as the "Anglo-Frisian brightening" or "the first
fronting". There has been an age-long dispute about some instances of OE
/a/, where some scholars have assumed restoration and others retention.
Everybody agrees that a following nasal blocked the fronting already in
Proto-Anglo-Frisian (hence OE mann/monn, etc.), and almost everybody
agrees that PWGmc. *a first changed to pre-OE *æ and only later was
retracted to /a/ before a back vowel. Opinions still differ as to what
precisely happened before "dark" /l/ in Anglian (plus "dark" /r/ in
Northumbrian), but it seems likely that Anglo-Frisian was not monolithic
in this respect, and that the AFris. brightening did not operate in this
context in the dialects ancestral to Anglian. At any rate, this Anglian
/a/ is older than the palatalisation of velars in pre-OE.
Piotr