The real meaning of Ancient Sanskrit?

This weekend, I took a look at the Sanskrit lessons at Early Indo-European Online. It's a funny thing: these languages can be so old, and yet with a lot still unsettled. As an aside, I've been hanging around a forum for Gaulish where much is yet uncertain, and skimming various Old Irish resources, all of which have to leave plenty of blanks for unattested words and word forms, so I'm getting used to the idea that Indo-European studies is still a field with much to work out, if only the funds were there to do it. Which brings me back to Sanskrit. The EIEOL lessons take a different tack than what I've seen elsewhere, asserting that most of what we know about Ancient Sanskrit is wrong. The problem: The people who started the scholarly tradition were baffled themselves about how to interpret some of the oldest texts, and did their best with a mix of speculation, folk etymology and the conviction that the texts somehow related to the religious practices they had developed in the 400 or 500 years between the composition of the songs in the Rig Veda and those songs actually being written down. The authors of the lessons assert that sometimes the scholarly traditions can take you off the trail rather than keeping you on it. So, instead, they approach Sanskrit the way they would approach any other Indo-European language for which they had a few texts but little outside information, in essence doing with Sanskrit what we, of necessity, had to do with Hittite and Tocharian.

If you're into Sanskrit, but the Vedas have always given you trouble compared with texts from the classical period, have a look. For my own part, I don't know enough to know whether the authors, Slocum (and especially) Thomson are tilting at windmills or on to something. But it looks like there are some interesting insights into Ancient Sanskrit worthy of consideration here.

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Speaking of Old Irish (wasn't I?), I've been digging into Stifter again, and looking at the forms for proto-Celtic and primitive Irish that he thoughtfully provides, and it seems like each time I look through, another element of the grammar seems to make sense in light of Latin, or Greek, or whatever. Who knows? Maybe some of my conjectures are even correct; but at the least they work for me. So a parting thought: if you're a budding polyglot, use anything you've got from any aspect of your language background that you can, if it helps, and keep an eye out for things that help you get a handle on how languages or language families work. There are a lot of associations to be made that are founded on actual knowledge, not just the silly tricks you find in the "you can remember anything" books.