schyrsivochter wrote:We’re talking about phonemes, and the reduction of unstressed /ɛ/ to [ə] is not present in all dialects (some Southern dialects don’t do it, for instance).
So which one is original? I've left with the impression that unstressed vowels in Proto-Germanic either dropped or reduced to [ə] and only later some dialects secondarily shifted it to [ɛ] or [e]. Did unstressed vowels somehow reduce to [ɛ] instead?