Coda Well-formedness in Old English

A good deal of Proto-Germanic words with coda clusters entered the Old English lexicon, and Old English speakers perhaps accepted the coda clusters as they were, as in segl > segl ‘sail’ and tagl > tægl ‘tail.’ However, it appears from the data available that some types of coda clusters in the Proto-Germanic words underwent a kind of repairing process in Old English so that the non-permitted coda clusters would become well-formed in Old English.
The data (n = 58) has been manually collected from Collins Online Dictionary (2022), Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (2001) and Ringe and Eska (2013), and shown in Table 1. The left column in the data table gives Old High German (OHG) words, Old Norse (ON) words right to the OHG words, and both or either of them perhaps were borrowed into Old English; this change is indicated by the shaftless arrow (>). The absence of a word in the table indicates that there is no word entry in the dictionary – for instance, nothing for dim in OHG.
The sole aim of the present data collection is to suggest potential hypotheses which are based on observation of the available data. If we are to make further progress in understanding Old English, the available data and the formulation of the hypotheses will be a necessary step forward (Ringe and Eska 2013).
Four hypotheses can be put forward by observing the available data, as shown in the file.