As noted above, the linguistic focus will be somewhat narrow temporally—by Chinese standards, at least: the period from roughly the 7th through the 1st centuries BCE. Most of the framing texts that became canonical in one tradition or another were written, compiled, edited, and much else during this period, and the classical language grew and was maturing at the same time. It continued to grow during the whole of later Chinese history, and canonical texts were added to the corpus throughout the same period; but the bases for both were laid during the earlier period, some knowledge of which were (and are) requisite for interpreting and translating them.