BVC has free stuff and inexpensive stuff, too. Glad you're giving this a try, and thank you for your support of my work!

I was wishing you were here this week for a question. I read somewhere that the Chinese can still read parchment that is four thousand years old -- the characters are still readily understandable and most still have the same meaning. How about the spoken language? Could someone Chinese today understand a person speaking five hundred year old Chinese? Or one thousand year old Chinese? I wonder if the same is true for Japanese or Korean?

These questions keep intruding and destroying my concentration for the current work!