Historical Linguistics and Language Families 8, Exercise 1: limits of texts

From Wikipedia, Philology:
  - Bronze Age texts first require decipherment.
  - Some scripts remain undeciphered, such as Linear A, whose language is
    unknown.
  - Where texts carry political or religious weight, objective conclusions
    are hard.
  - Textual criticism and interpretation have no clear boundary.
  - Editorial reconstruction can distort the manuscript record (the new
    philology objection).

None of these is stated by the source as being about pronunciation. The limit
that stops a text telling you how a word was pronounced is my addition:
spelling is not sound (Phonetics and the IPA 1). That is why the Great
Vowel Shift matters: English spelling was fixed before the shift, so it no
longer shows the pronunciation.