A language is not just words. It is a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It is all embodied in a language.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Welcome to A Language Log
Language is never merely a tool. It is an inheritance, a living archive of every people who ever named the wind, mourned the dead, fell in love, or argued about what a word really means.
This is a log about all of it.
What You’ll Find Here
Here, we explore language the way Borges explored labyrinths: with curiosity, without a fixed destination, and with the firm belief that every turn reveals something worth knowing.
Whether you are learning your second language or your sixth, studying the deep structures of grammar, or simply wondering why one culture has seventeen words for rain – this is your place.
I write about:
- The learning process: the frustration, the breakthroughs, the joy of thinking in a new tongue.
- Language and identity: how the words we carry shape who we believe ourselves to be.
- Linguistics and structure: the hidden architecture beneath everyday speech.
- Culture and community: what languages tell us about the people who built them.
A Log, Not a Textbook
While I might follow a variety of particular courses along the way, this website is not itself a curriculum. There are no lessons to complete, no tests to pass. It is a record of genuine encounters with language; patient, exploratory, and always a work in progress.
Pull up a chair. Pick a thread. Click the Browse by Language and Browse by Topic widgets, or select a language of interest from the top menu to see the discreet archive for that language.
More languages will be added as I approach them myself. I’m already flirting with Sanskrit and Tibetan, so those are the most likely candidates to be included next.