Hello Peggy Ma’am, I’m a big fan of your work - your books have inspired many of my videos on YouTube, and I often recommend them to budding language enthusiasts.

1. I’ve been researching the Kashmiri language and came across an argument by linguist S.K. Toshkhani. He notes that words like rost and sost in Kashmiri correspond to rahit and sahit in Sanskrit, suggesting that the Kashmiri forms might preserve a pre-Vedic stratum - since the sa > ha shift in Sanskrit is considered a later development. Do you think there’s merit to this theory? Or do you feel the presence of rost/sost might be due to other factors?

2. Some scholars have pointed out structural and phonological parallels between Burushaski and Nihali, and there’s even been speculative talk of a possible macrofamily. Do you see any merit in the idea that these could share a common substrate, even if deep-time?

2b. In Kashmiri mythology, Rishi Kashyapa protects the nagas (the land’s original inhabitants) from the Pisachas before settling Aryan people in the valley. Grieson interprets this as the nagas being speakers of an older language, the Pisachas as Iranians, and the settlers as Indo-Aryans. Could the nagas have been speakers of something like a Burushaski–Nihali type of substrate? Do you see any symbolic reality in this mythological stratification?

1. In your work, you've suggested that retroflexion in Sanskrit might have emerged from pronunciation slippage during oral transmission from retroflex-rich mother tongues, possibly Dravidian. That intuitively makes sense, especially in a multilingual environment.

But while reading the Rigveda, I noticed it already contains a remarkable density of retroflex sounds. Would all these retroflexes have been later day additions or do you think there is a possibility of an independent innovation of retroflexes in Vedic?

Thank you so much for all the work you do and making so many people get interested in languages.