Studying Indian Historical Linguistics, as an English-speaking Canadian:
Open up a poorly mimeographed book written anywhere from 70 to 150 years ago. The writing is blurry, with gaps. (And yes, if you know me, this DOES mean that my brain interprets everything as pictures instead of words!) Diacritics were written on afterwards, and some are missing.
Writing style is:
old fashioned, because it was written a while ago
quite formal, because Indian English has different standards of formality than mine
stilted, because the authour is translating all their info from a bunch of 1000-6000 year old Sanskrit manuscripts
esoteric, because Indian linguistics has a 6000 year history and they see no reason to switch to western terminology (they are Correct)
Charts exist, but are used noticeably differently. :(
Instead of the phonology being described straightforwardly, it's all brought in as changes to the original Sanskrit (or Old Indo-Aryan). You better have a good understanding of the minutiae of Sanskrit phonology, even if it's 3000 years before your period!
After reading the very short phonology description, you read the next 30 pages of descriptions of individual period words compared to Sanskrit. It's important to write a cheat sheet of all the acronyms, because this book is about all the dialects used across all of India over a 1000 year period, and the only indication of if THIS particular page is useful to you is brief reference to 'WAp.' half way through. Some of the phonology section's statements are contradicted by the examples. The authour agrees with you that this is annoying, but its what the grammarian in 600AD said, so the authour has faithfully included it.
Note that most of these words are actually from stereotyped accents recorded in plays of the period. (Or from Jain texts. Jainism is the BEST religion, because they wrote in the same dialect they spoke in, rather than in Sanskrit! I love the Jains.) So we don't know how accurate the dialects that are recorded actually were. It's like basing studies of African-American English on minstrel shows and Uncle Tom stories. They provide VERY valuable data about the period, but they ... need to be interpreted carefully.
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There is so much information! It is beautifully thorough! But its all framed in ways that aren't used outside of Indian linguistics, the terminology is really different, and the reproductions are hard to read.
(I just finished a section where it took an entire paragraph to figure out if they were writing 'ñ', 'ś', or 'ṽ'! It was 'ṽ'.)
If this was my main field, I think I'd be fine. But I'm trying compare languages, here. I forget things while I go off and study other languages that use different conventions! Reminding myself what 'cerebral' means (it means 'retroflex'), while trying to figure out if that corner of a letter is an 'n' or an 'i', while ALSO trying to figure out what a 'closed a' (saṃvṛta) is, because that's a Sanskrit thing so they don't need to explain it ... (while also trying to convince my disabled brain that the things on the page ARE words, really, even though they're slightly blurry) ... it's exhausting.
(Still, it is SO NICE to have actual period information! I'm being SPOILED!)
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(Anyone know what the "two types of 'a' are"? Looking up 'vṛta' and 'saṃvṛta' has been less helpful than hoped, and none of my Sanskrit grammars want to explain. It's not the difference in quality between Sanskrit long and short 'a's. But I don't know what it IS!)
