Language Log is a collaborative language blog maintained by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman.
The site is updated almost daily at the whims of the contributors, and most of the posts are on language use in the media and popular culture. Google search results are frequently used as a corpus to test hypotheses about language. Other popular topics are the descriptivism/prescriptivism debate and linguistics-related news items. The site has also occasionally held contests in which visitors attempt to identify an obscure language.
Language Log is now one of the most popular linguistics blogs. As of June 2011, it receives an average of almost 21,000 visits per day. In May 2006, a compilation of posts by Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum was published in book form under the title Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log.
Read more about Language Log: Specialties, Becky Award, Contributors, Coinages
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or log:
“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be,
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To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)