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I don't understand what Trask meant in this passage, so I can't explain it to you. I would actually disagree with the statement that English follows "quite different" strategies of spelling in French …

[Edit: At first, I completely misread this question as asking about voiced aspirates. Sorry about that!] Yes. Gujarati is the first example I was able to find. Wikipedia says Intervocalically …

This question seems confused. For one thing, you never define what you mean by “such languages”. A precise formulation of the concepts is important. No reasonable linguist would support the idea that …

(partial answer) Actually, the uvular stop in Semitic languages is often thought to have developed from an earlier "emphatic" velar stop. I think there are some extant Semitic languages where it is r …

I don't think it's at all common for alveolopalatal and/or sibilant consonants to undergo place changes that are directly conditioned by the presence or absence of voicing: French doesn't actually see …

I don't know of an explanation. V is not the only letter that has developed alternative forms based on its position in a word; this kind of development seems to just happen sometimes, without there ne …

This isn't direct evidence, but this paper mentions several proposed etymologies that make use of feature metathesis: Feature metathesis and the change of PIE *du̯ to Classical Armenian -rk (Diachroni …

I don't think that bound forms tend to resist sound changes in general. Bound forms might in some cases provide more information about the historical form of a word because they occur in a different p …

If you insist on a strict reading of "one-to-one correspondence between sound and written symbol", there are actually very few, if any, well-known languages that qualify. Italian certainly doesn't: it …

No; the pattern of final <z> in the singular vs. <ces> in the plural is a modern spelling convention that's unrelated to the Old Spanish distinction between a voiced and voiceless sibilant phoneme (th …

Tongan /s/ seems to be the regular reflex of *t before /i/. Wikipedia says Tongan has retained the original proto-Polynesian *h, but has merged it with the original *s as /h/. (The /s/ found in mo …

The occurrence of the sound change [f] > [h] > ∅ in modern Spanish words does seem fairly unpredictable. I think this is a situation where dialect mixing and reborrowing/learned re-formation of words …

I don't have enough reputation to put this as a comment, so I'll just leave it here: one way that a sound change can occur between two PoA without ever moving through all of the intermediate positions …

It seems the use of x in -axъ is thought to be related to the "ruki" law. However, becasue this is not the usual context for the application of this sound law, it is supposed that some kind of analogy …

Using the searchable version of the Index Diachronica (courtesy of chridd), I found some other possible developments: Proto-Algonquian to Kennebec River Abenaki: *θ → n / #_ *θ → s / _k *θ → r Prot …