Abstract

ECHEVERRI, Juan Álvaro. Language Is Breath: «Even if You Learn Little, It Opens Your Mind». Forma. func. [online]. 2023, vol.36, n.2, e1182.  Epub June 04, 2023. ISSN 0120-338X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/fyf.v36n2.101182.

This article addresses two issues: one related to turning speech into text, taking as a starting point the author's ethnographic experiences trying to learn, understand, transcribe, translate and represent an Amerindian language: the Murui (or Uitoto) language, and the other linked to collective experiences with language where writing does not intervene, based on the experience of the Cátedra "Language is Spirit", at the Amazonia Campus of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. The discussion is inspired by Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language, in contrast to what Walter Benjamin called "the bourgeois theory of language": a means to refer to something and addressed to another human being. The approach is from spirit-Geist-Breath-Body, to make sense of the equation (territory/body) ~ Breath = language, which can be read as "language is the breath of a territorialized body". This is the object of this article.

Keywords : language onthology; Murui, Witoto; vegetable salt; Wilhelm von Humboldt; verbal art.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )