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You can find some information about phoneme inventories (separated by consonants and vowels) in the WALS survey. WALS has also surveys about some phoneme features, e.g., presence of unusual consonants …

Similarity is in the ear of the listener. When we acquire our first language, our ears and brains become trained in all the phonemic differences that are relevant for that language. When we than lear …

The second question can be easily answered: There is Rhotacism, the change of another sound into an r. Examples are proto-Italic and Ancient Latin z -> r, Hunsrück German dialects with intervocalic …

I only know a term from typography for that thing, it is greeking. In typography greeking is used to demonstrate layout and fonts without distracting the judges by the contents of the text. Maybe, it' …

This answer is about High German (no dialects). The standard pronunciation prescribes a clear contrast voiced/voiceless in initial and medial position, neutralisation only occurs at the word final p …

Some dialects of German (notably Ripuarian (Kölsch) and Moselfränkisch) show this phenomenon. Here words like Balkon are pronounced /balkoŋ/ and also schön becomes /ʃɛŋ/. I don't know what diachronic …

Researchers speak of Segmental Variability or Density of Phonetic Encoding in this respect, see, e.g., Zofia Malisz, Erika Brandt, Bernd Möbius, Yoon Mi Oh, and Bistra Andreeva,Dimensions of Segmental …

While the information content of a syllable can vary considerably between natural languages this fact is largely compensated by speech rate: Languages with simple syllables are spoken at a faster pace …

Yes, there is Index Diachronica that is available as a searchable online database (in the link given above) or as a pdf file with all the sound laws nicely typeset.

IPA is not designed for the precise description of phones (the infinite number of "sounds" referred in the question). It is designed to describe any possible phonemic (phonemes are analogous to the di …

There are two different things to consider: Contrast between dental and retroflex d's and t's: Such a contrast has developped in the Indic subbranch of the Indoarian languages, probably due to contac …

There are generally accepted estimates on how many shades of grey (far less than 50!) or how many colours the human eye can distinguish. How many different vowels can the human ear distinguish? To qu …

The best is to get a dictionary of the language you are interested in, in the case of your example a dictionary of English. The dictionary needs to use IPA (not all of them do, my copy of Merriam-Webs …

I have finally found an example meeting the rather strong criteria of the question: mine In older stages of English, mine was a form of my to be used when the following word starts with a vowel (simi …

Considering manual annotation, there is WebAnno, a very flexible annotation tool that allows you to define your own annotation layers. It has a web user interface and allows for collaborative annotat …