Iranian and Indo-Aryan

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Mon, 6 Nov 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

> I've been looking over some documents in Avestan and Rigvedic Sanskrit
> [...]
> Would they have been mutually comprehensible?

Most certainly! It should be remembered that the handbook impression of
Avestan is anachronistic, since the recital form of the old text has
simply participated in over a millennium of further Old and Middle Iranian
phonetic development. If pushed back to its time, even if only to a point
where the metre of the Gathas gets consistent, it takes on an appearance
which looks like Sanskrit just as much as British and American English
resemble each other.

Jens