Six Tuscan Poets, by Giorgio Vasari, 1544. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota.

Communication

Volume V, Number 2 | spring 2012

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Preamble

Word Order

By Lewis H. Lapham

The Internet is blessed with undoubtedly miraculous applications, but language is not yet one of them. Technology cannot displace the primacy of words.

Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia, by Jean-Joseph Taillasson, 1787.

Essay

Tape Delay

By Madeline Miller

How we misread Virgil for two thousand years, and what made it possible for a small group of scholars to figure it out.

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Living Languages

Facts and figures on the languages of the world.

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Miscellany

François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand complained late in life that he was going deaf. When someone mentioned the malady to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, he remarked, “He only thinks he is deaf because he can no longer hear anyone talking about him.”