The revival of Hebrew is a counter example, of a "ritual" language that managed to become a practical daily language for written and spoken communication.
Biblical Hebrew has no vowel markings (well it does, but they are an interpretation), so it cannot be used in daily speech. Modern Hebrew is distinct from Biblical Hebrew. Sanskrit itself does not have much use as an actual language because it lacks a lot of the features that, say, Hindi or English or Ancient Greek have, it has 7 past tenses that are basically identical and it does not make fine distinctions between moods, which it does not have enough of. Only Vedic Sanskrit could actually be used as a language, but similarly to Ancient Greek there are relatively few extant texts in Vedic Sanskrit and certainly the task of learning the language to fluency would be monstrous compared to studying a living language; and one that few, if any, would be willing to devote their life towards, especially considering that Classical Sanskrit already works fine enough as a literary language and is only so practical for that purpose because it has such a strictly defined grammar.
> Biblical Hebrew has no vowel markings (well it does, but they are an interpretation), so it cannot be used in daily speech. Modern Hebrew is distinct from Biblical Hebrew
The same can be said about Latin (of which we do not exactly know how they used to pronounce words), or any other language. How to pronounce letters or words is always "interpretation" (or more accurately, tradition).
The mathematical study of the evolution of vowels in languages is quite well developed, and we can say with huge certainty that we know how classical Latin was pronounced. Yes, there absolutely were regional dialectal differences, but we do not rely on "tradition" to say that a long "i" sound (/i:/) was pronounced like the vowel in modern English "tree".
Well the difference is that different vowels can signify not only different cases or declensions but even different words entirely in afroasiatic languages. So, yes, missing vowels means that the edition that does have vowels (developed in the 10th century I believe) is a particular interpretation of the work.
I see, very interesting, thanks! I've been curious about Sanskrit "indirectly" from learning about root words in Slavic (and other) languages, as they call it proto-Indo-European roots. Similarly with ancient Greek or Latin, I enjoy learning the etymology of many of the words in modern languages like Spanish, French, etc.