Lydia Nickerson wrote: > What amazes me about Shakespeare is how well I can understand > language that is 600 years old. [...] > [...] I can enjoy Shakespeare needing little more than > footnotes and an occasional use of a good dictionary, proves to me > that English is not inefficient and ponderous, but rather it is > flexible and remarkably resilient, even when left in the untutored > hands of someone like myself. Well, Shakespeare was just a genius with the English language. My wife and I went to see a live performance of Much Ado About Nothing when we were in Manhattan over Memorial Day; my wife is Chinese and although she speaks English pretty well, she has difficulty understanding most movies and television shows. I was a tad concerned that she would be lost by the language of Shakespeare, as well, but I needn't have worried. As accessible as that play is, she had no problem at all understanding virtually everything. That says a lot about the writing. (It didn't hurt that the venue was almost microscopic, as well; we were perhaps twenty feet from the actors.) -- Frank Mayhar frank at exit.com http://www.exit.com/ Exit Consulting http://www.gpsclock.com/