Nilgiri
INT'L MOD
Yes Vedic Sanskrit and Old Avestan (specifically their continued liturgies) offer essentially direct time machines/portals.....unavailable to any other language to this degree "upstream". Because of the liturgical importance attached to the retention of the intrinsic sound as sacred dating to pre-writing era (a feature shared with the Jews and their original oral transmission of the Torah, but those phonologies are lost due to their specific intense trial and tribulation..... and can only be reconstructed in a backwards way from what we have now regd mostly medieval "classical" Hebrew - which inevitably leaves a lot of gaps/doubts on the specific sounds, but the meaning is near fully understood since we are using written records, scripts and sound interpolation). Ancient Greek also is reconstructed backwards phonologically this way (given the homeric hymns + epics on record etc).
The India-China relations thread will be interesting one to follow for you and others with time too. As Chinese for example (without such time portal) relies on things like rhyme tables (of older extant written work, with the known phonologies of today or of the time of analysis done earlier by a Chinese linguist scholar say in Qing or Ming period etc with regards to the Tang , Han et al.)
That's how we are able to deduce pretty substantial phonological shifts that occured between types of Chinese (causing the unending debate if they are dialect vs language, again with its contours of politics involved)...because things "rhyme" better (as written in the old text) with one set of phonologies compared to another set....and thus say middle or old chinese can be reconstructed to some degree.
There is a whole interesting study as well (using rhyme tables again) regarding when tones appeared (in middle chinese) as substitutes for coda-phonologies that were dropped from old chinese (which is largely agreed upon as a non-tonal language).
But with presence of Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan (in respective liturgies, and retained faithfully and as unbroken as possible), there is a unique direct overpass highway (given preservation and transmittance of original sound and original phonology faithfully) that is a portal to the phonology directly....that bypasses what every other language has to do (and needs writing to have commenced as well).
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