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As an addendum to cyco130's excellent answer, it's easy to see based on simple math that resemblances like the ones you cite can tell us nothing about language relationship. From looking at some of t …

Many or most Indic languages possess voiceless aspirated stops. Cross-linguistically, such stops often turn into fricatives: e.g., in Indo-European, this happened in Greek, in Iranian, and probably in …

Not quite parallel but at least similarly asymmetrical: in Ancient Greek, *ky > [tt] / [ss] depending on dialect, while *gy > [zd] / [dz]. Presumably both went through an affricate stage of some kind. …

Another Ancient Greek example is the treatment of Proto-Indo-European labiovelars before /i/. The voiceless labiovelar *kʷ became dental /t/, while the voiced *gʷ became labial /b/: *kʷis 'who' > τί …

Latin and Greek, just like English, are Indo-European languages: they're descended from an ancestor language called Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which we know relatively little about because it was spok …

To answer your second question first -- yes, in the combination γγ the first gamma is always pronounced as a nasal, e.g. ἄγγελος angelos (not aggelos). To the question in your title, no, there is no …

No. Some instances of Proto-Indo-European *s were rhotacized in Germanic; some instances of PIE *s went to /x/ in Slavic by the Ruki rule. There is some overlap between the two sets, but the environme …

The main PIE feminine derivational suffix was -ih2: compare *deiu-o- 'god' with *deiu-ih2 'goddess' (Skt. devī). Incidentally, this suffix is actually the indirect source of the Greek suffix -ssa: wh …

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word should fit the bill.

Familiar cases of metathesis involve segments changing places, but metathesis can also operate at the subsegmental level, affecting individual features. I'm specifically interested in metathesis of PO …

[Mods feel free to migrate to Latin SE if appropriate.] This is part of the "first compensatory lengthening", a set of regular Greek sound changes involving the loss of PIE/Proto-Greek *y and *s. In t …

Most sound changes that involve consonantal place of articulation are gradual changes between two POAs that are contiguous: for example, a velar gets gradually fronted until it becomes a palatal. What …

The Indo-European sound change known as Brugmann's Law states that PIE *o became ā in an open syllable in Indo-Iranian. The Wiki page calls the law "controversial" and says that "Brugmann's Law has fe …

They are indeed both from the same PIE root, which however is reconstructed with a laryngeal, *semH-. PGmc *sama- "same" is a thematic derivative from the o-grade of this root, *somH-o-, found in man …

The loss of intervocalic s is one of the defining features of Proto-Greek: that is, it occurred before the earliest attested Greek and is common to all the Greek dialects. It is thought to have gone t …