The Body of Language, the Flesh of Thought

There is a very common — and almost always silent — confusion between language and tongue. People say that when one learns a language, they acquire a tool, as if they were picking up a screwdriver, a hammer, a blade. As though the tongue were something external, a neutral technology, a utilitarian object. But I never believed that. From an early age, I sensed that language is not something we carry in our pockets; it is something that carries us, passes through us, and shapes us from within, as if we were clay and it, the breath that gives us form.

That is why, when I teach languages, I reject the metaphor of the machine. Teaching a language is touching the flesh of someone else’s thought; it’s drawing close to the way someone inhabits the world, not merely how they name it. For we do not speak only with our mouths, nor only with the sounds that escape them — we speak with our entire body, with cultural memory, with the emotion nested in syllables. And every language has a distinct body, a particular rhythm, a breath of its own.

French, for example, is not just a succession of elegant nasal words; it is an inclination toward nuance, a way of circling the idea before daring to touch it directly, as though courting it. English — especially in business — is direct, strategic, pragmatic, precise, as if leaping past the in-between to get straight to the point. To teach these languages is to do more than provide vocabulary: it is to listen to their bodies, understand their movements, perceive where they hold back, where they step forward, and where they feel deeply, in silence.

The translator, perhaps more than anyone, feels this displacement between linguistic bodies. For translating is not simply replacing words — it is clothing one idea in another skin, exchanging breath while keeping the spirit intact. It is letting the flesh of language remain alive even when transplanted. A good translator, like a good teacher, knows that both acts deal with the invisible: what lies between words, what pulses between the lines, what is never said but is always present.

In my classes — in which I try more to listen than to speak — I see that each student carries a relationship with language that is as physical as it is intellectual. Some fear pronunciation; others feel naked before grammar. Some believe speaking a new language is a betrayal; others find, for the first time, a home in it, a place where they can be themselves without asking permission from the homeland.

And perhaps this is the most beautiful part: to understand that learning a new language is learning a new way of inhabiting the world. There is nothing superficial in that. It is an act of courage, of reinvention, of openness. And if language is the flesh of thought, then learning a new tongue is being born again — with new muscles, new silences, new pauses.

That is why I teach slowly, with care and deep listening. Because I know that, for many, learning a language is not merely acquiring a skill: it is a reconstruction of the self, a stitching of new skin over the soul.

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Fragmentos do Verbo is this atelier: where words gain body, and thought becomes flesh.