Today I was reading and came across the word stranger. It was one of those times when my brain flips a switch and makes me stop. So I stopped reading and looked at the word. I thought it interesting that if I changed the a for an o (stronger) the vowel sound would change but, more than that, so would the way we say the g.
I decided that one word, stranger, probably came from French and the other from German and came home to look it up.
Yes, strange (and stranger, of course) came to English from Old French and in the coming was aphetized. I had to look that up, too. It means that the original French word had an unaccented vowel at its beginning, in this case, e--estrange; estrangier--which was dropped. Hence strange, not estrange, when we use the word as an adjective. But English also kept estrange. It's a verb, as you know.
Now, strong. It does come to English from German and Old Norse and Middle Dutch and Middle Low German, Old Frisian, and Old High German--all Germanic languages. It appeared as strangr, strenge, strengi, etc., and is related to the word, string. When the word was strangr, which looks like strange only stranger (a little humor there), the a sounded like ah and eventually the vowel changed to o. The g was always pronounced back in the throat, as we say strong and stronger today.
Even I have to say that such a foray into a couple of words is strange--can't help it, I have to use it here. Either that or weird. But these kinds of things are among my "strong" (that was intentional) interests.
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