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A friend shared a video titled Le langage de Dieu with me on Facebook Messenger and I had to have it translated into English since I do not speak French.

Here is the link to the YouTube video:

Below is the transcript converted by my AI assistant Sage:

Sage said: Yes — here is the text with the timestamps removed and translated into English.

A few places in the transcript were clearly auto-transcribed imperfectly, so I translated them into the most natural English based on the meaning.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Take an empty room, isolated from the world. Place several newborns in it.

Formally forbid anyone from speaking to them, from uttering even a single word in their presence. Feed them, change them, and leave. The only goal here is to keep them alive.

Then wait. Wait to see what the first language they will speak will be.

Because if there is a natural language inscribed in our human nature before any form of culture, before any education, then these children should be able to spontaneously reveal a language that we have all forgotten: the original language.

Chapter 2: The Forbidden Experiments

It is obviously a monstrous experiment, and yet it was attempted several times throughout different eras by all kinds of rulers powerful enough to believe themselves above ethics.

So let us begin with our first account from Herodotus, the Greek historian of the 5th century BCE. He recounts that Psammetichus I, Pharaoh of Egypt, supposedly carried out this experiment around six centuries before Jesus Christ. Two newborns were entrusted to a shepherd with one strict instruction: absolute silence.

After two years, the children supposedly uttered one word: bekos.

The Pharaoh had his scholars investigate. Bekos means bread in Phrygian, a language spoken in Anatolia. The Pharaoh’s triumphant conclusion: bingo — Phrygian is the original language of humanity.

The Egyptians were convinced that their language was the oldest in the world. Psammetichus supposedly accepted his defeat gracefully, acknowledging the superiority of the Phrygians. Very noble of him, you might say — except that it is probably false.

Herodotus himself seems skeptical, and for good reason: bekos sounds strangely like the bleating of a goat. The children may simply have imitated the animals around them.

The story of our isolated babies returns later, in 1211, and was supposedly reproduced by Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire. He was no fool — far from it. He was nicknamed Stupor Mundi, “the wonder of the world,” because of his learning.

Yes, because he spoke many languages, was interested in mathematics, philosophy, and zoology. The small problem was that his thirst for knowledge, and for dissecting the world, drove him to want to know what language Adam and Eve spoke in the Garden of Eden.

All the children were fed and washed, but no one spoke to them. They were not rocked to sleep. No one smiled at them while articulating sounds. They all died.

Three centuries later, in 1493, James of Scotland tried the experiment in turn.

He had two children confined on a deserted island with a mute woman charged with feeding them. According to some accounts, the children spoke Hebrew, and according to others, they said absolutely nothing. The sources are contradictory and unreliable, probably embellished to please the king.

What is certain is that James IV was fascinated by languages. He spoke several himself. He collected books and financed printing. He may have been seeking less a divine proof than a confirmation of his intellectual intuitions.

Chapter 3: Language as a Condition

Everything these experiments revealed was exactly the opposite of what they were trying to prove.

They showed that language is not innate, but acquired. And more than that, they showed that without language, something fundamental in the human being does not develop.

Frederick II’s children died because without language there is no mutual recognition, no emergence of the self. The world does not stabilize. Language is the condition of our humanity.

We tend to think that language is used to communicate. That is its obvious function. That is what we are taught from early childhood. It is a practical tool. When we want something or feel something, we ask for it with words.

But language does not first serve to communicate. It serves to exist.

If you take a newborn, for example, during the first months there is no “I.” The baby does not clearly distinguish itself from the world around it. It does not know where its body ends and where the mother’s begins.

Then gradually, around eighteen months or sometimes later, the child begins to say that famous “I”: “I want that, I do this.”

You are witnessing a true ontological revolution.

The self appears with language, not before it.

Psychologists have shown that without language, our identity cannot be stable — that is, there is no consciousness of self as a distinct and lasting entity.

Language literally creates the subject, and the first act of this invention is the name.

Yes, to be named is to be recognized as a subject.

But language does not merely create the self; it also creates the world. And of course, when I say that, I am not speaking of the physical world, because trees, earth, and animals would exist perfectly well without us. But the world as reality is stabilized by language.

Before language, there is sensory chaos. The baby sees moving shapes and hears varying sounds. Then little by little, language cuts through that chaos into distinct objects. This is mommy, this is daddy, this is a dog, this is a table.

Language fixes and categorizes. It establishes boundaries, and without it, the world remains unstable and impossible to grasp.

And of course, this stabilization is constitutive of our relationship to reality.

I mean, you and I do not see the world as it is. We see the world as our language allows us to see it. We distinguish nuances because our language gives us the categories for doing so.

I will go even further: the future also depends on language.

We can project ourselves into a time that does not yet exist. We can imagine possible scenarios and choose among them. That is what allows us to concretely plan future projects and orient our lives according to the choices we make.

So if language allows us to project ourselves into the future, then it also obviously allows us to understand that this future has an end.

You are going to die. You know it.

You know that this “I” which formalizes your identity will one day cease to exist.

An animal can feel fear in the face of imminent death. It can flee from a predator. Some animals recognize death and may even be troubled by the disappearance of one of their own.

But what they lack is permanent existential anguish.

And I think they are quite lucky in that regard, because they do not have this abstract and reflective consciousness that sometimes causes us to wake in the night thinking that one day we will no longer be here — that everything we are, and everything we have done, will disappear.

And that anguish requires not only consciousness; it requires language in order to be conceptualized as an inescapable certainty.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger called this “being-toward-death.”

The human being is the only being that exists knowing that it will cease to exist. It is terrifying. And all of that is made possible by language.

Language is what pulled us out of our animal innocence and cast us into existential anguish.

Once you speak, once you have access to language, you can no longer return to the peaceful unconsciousness of the animal.

And who better than Mr. Wittgenstein, when dealing with the subject of language…

Chapter 4: The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein / The Ineffable

Wittgenstein ends his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with a strange sentence:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

This implies that there are things that cannot be spoken of — experiences, sensations, truths that escape language.

And if they escape language, then they also escape conscious thought. Because for us, to think is to speak to ourselves, to formulate sentences in our head.

Without words, there is no articulated thought.

Our philosopher also wrote something else:

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

If I have no words for something, that thing remains elusive. It may exist, yes, but I cannot mentally manipulate it, and therefore I logically cannot speak of it to others.

A simple example: take the color red.

You say “red,” but what have you done by saying that word? You have taken an infinity of possible shades of red and crushed them into a single category.

The red of this tomato, the red of that sunset — you call them all “red,” even though they are all different. Every red is unique. Every red has its own quality and its own intensity.

But the word red erases them all to make them one.

Language simplifies and reduces raw experience into something communicable, but also something poorer.

You can do this with countless things around you.

Take a walk in the forest. You will see dozens, hundreds of trees. Every one of them is different. Every tree is the result of a unique history of chance and adaptation. But you prefer to reduce all that to one single word: tree.

You erase all that singularity, that multiplicity of concrete experiences transformed into an abstract concept.

By naming them “tree,” you create a psychological category that has no exact equivalent in reality.

In philosophy, this is called abstraction. It is the process by which we move from the concrete to the abstract. It is the very basis of language.

There is no other way. If every tree had to have its own name, or every shade of red had to have its own word, language would become unusable. There would be thousands of words; no one could learn them, no one could communicate.

So we sacrifice precision in order to gain efficiency. We accept that language is a destructive compression of reality.

But look — there is a small problem. We eventually forget that it is a compression, and by doing that, we lose access to raw experience unfiltered by language.

Now I want to ask you to look at your hand.

Observe it carefully. Think of nothing. Do not say to yourself, “this is my hand.” Do not try to analyze it.

Just look at it.

And you will quickly realize that it is almost impossible not to name its characteristics.

Your brain immediately begins to label: that is the hand, those are the fingers, that is the thumb.

And as soon as you name all that, you lose the strangeness of this thing moving at the end of your arm — this thing that obeys you, but which you do not really control at the cellular level, this thing that grows old without asking your opinion.

Without language, your hand becomes mysterious again.

And this mystery is what we call the ineffable, or more precisely, that which cannot be said.

In Christianity, Saint John of the Cross speaks of the dark night of the soul. It is a state in which God makes Himself known precisely by His absence. God does not speak; He is silent. And in that silence, something deeper than words can emerge.

But you do not need to be a mystic to feel all of this. You have all experienced it already.

A piece of music that makes you cry without knowing why. A moment of intimacy with someone where you understand each other without saying anything.

All those little moments resist language.

You can try to tell them afterward. You can say it was beautiful, intense — but you know that the words do not do justice to what you felt.

Something remains trapped in the experience, impossible to extract, impossible to fully share.

And perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of language.

Yes, it allows us to communicate, to think, to build entire civilizations — but at the same time, it separates us from pure reality. It places a veil of words between us and the world. It makes you see categories that prevent you from perceiving the individual in all of its complexity.

And Wittgenstein understood that.

Language reveals certain things, but it hides others.

It is clear, but it also casts shadows. And what lies where words do not reach is just as important as what language reveals — perhaps even more important.

Beyond the limit of what can be said, one must remain silent out of respect for what surpasses words.

And how could one not also mention George Orwell’s 1984 when speaking of language?

Chapter 5: Newspeak

Orwell published the novel in 1949. The story takes place in a totalitarian future where Big Brother watches everything.

And in that novel, Orwell invents something terrifying: Newspeak — a language specifically designed to make certain thoughts impossible.

The principle is simple and diabolical: if you remove a word, you remove the capacity to think what that word designates.

In this language, there is only one word to designate the idea of good: good. To say bad, you say ungood. To say very good, you say plusgood.

It sounds ridiculous, but think about it for a second.

In French, you have dozens of words to express nuances between good and bad: wonderful, excellent, admirable, magnificent, superb, splendid. Each of these words carries a slightly different connotation.

But by removing them, by keeping only plusgood, your inner world becomes impoverished because it loses all its nuances.

But Orwell goes even further. In Newspeak, the word free still exists, but only in contexts such as “this dog is free of fleas.” In other words, you can say that an object is free of something that encumbers it, but you can no longer say “this man is politically free,” because the very concept of political freedom no longer exists.

There is no word for it.

But then, without words, how can you claim what you cannot even name?

Smith, the main character, works at the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite newspaper articles from the past so that they conform to the official version of history.

But what fascinates him is the Newspeak dictionary his colleagues are working on. They remove words year after year. They simplify grammar. They eliminate synonyms.

The objective is very clear: with each passing year, citizens become a little less capable of thinking for themselves.

You might say that this is science fiction, that in real life people cannot be controlled by suppressing words.

Except Orwell’s hypothesis is not absurd at all. It is based on the fact that language structures thought.

Remember Wittgenstein: the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

Orwell draws from this that to control language is to control the way people think and the way people perceive reality.

But there is another, subtler aspect. It is not only the suppression of words that poses a problem; it is also the absence of certain words in a given language.

Take, for example, the German word Schadenfreude. Yes, I know — and sorry for the accent, I studied Spanish as my second language. This word expresses the joy one feels at another’s misfortune.

There is no exact equivalent in French. You can say malicious joy at the suffering of others, but that already takes several words. In German, it is only one.

And that difference is not trivial, because having a unique word for something makes that thing easier to think.

A German speaker can say to himself, “Ah, I am feeling Schadenfreude,” and identify that emotion immediately. A French speaker has to make a much greater mental effort. He has to break it down and analyze it.

Another example: in Turkish, you cannot simply say “it is raining.”

You must indicate how you know it is raining. Did you see it yourself? Did someone tell you? Did you infer it because the ground is wet?

The grammar forces you to mark the source of your knowledge. It is built into the conjugation, so it is impossible to avoid.

As a consequence, Turkish children develop very early a sharp awareness of the difference between direct knowledge and indirect knowledge.

They spontaneously distinguish between what they have verified themselves and what they have merely been told.

If you grow up speaking a language that constantly forces you to ask yourself, “How do I know this?” you will inevitably develop a kind of natural epistemology. Because of this, you will not swallow everything people tell you, since you will question your sources.

People whose language is very precise end up noticing nuances that other cultures do not even see.

How many things do you not think simply because you have no words to name them?

Your linguistic poverty may well be a cognitive poverty.

So enriching your vocabulary means giving yourself the means to think things you did not think before. Conversely, impoverishing your language means impoverishing the space of your possible thoughts.

Orwell ends his novel with something chilling. He imagines a future in which the works of the past would become impossible to understand because language would have changed so much that no one could grasp what they were saying.

The words would still be there, but their meaning would have vanished — and with it, the very possibility of thinking what the authors thought.

Newspeak is a warning.

Language can be a tool of liberation, but also a tool of control.

And the first step of control is to make people believe that words do not matter.

Chapter 6: Translation as a Metaphysical Act

Here is an Italian proverb: “Translator, traitor.”

It is a bit exaggerated, I admit, but it is still a little true. Every translation is a choice, and those choices close some doors and open others.

When it comes to foundational texts that have shaped entire civilizations, these choices have metaphysical consequences.

Here is the beginning of the Gospel according to John:

“In the beginning was the Word.”

In Greek, it literally says: “In the beginning was the Logos.”

Except that logos does not refer to just one thing.

In ancient Greek, logos means at once speech, discourse, reason, organizing principle, logic, calculation. It is a massive philosophical concept that runs through all Greek thought since Heraclitus.

And when Heraclitus speaks of the logos, he is speaking of the law that governs the universe, the principle by which chaos becomes cosmos — order.

Now look at the translations.

In French, we say, “In the beginning was the Word.” In English, “In the beginning was the Word.” Word or parole is rather reductive, don’t you think?

We chose to privilege the linguistic aspect of logos at the expense of all the others. We transformed a dense philosophical concept into something simpler.

And doesn’t that remind you of something? Newspeak?

I exaggerate a little, but still — it is more accessible and therefore poorer.

A French-speaking Christian who reads “In the beginning was the Word” will not think at all the same thing as a Greek Christian. The first thinks of God pronouncing creative words; the second thinks of God as the organizing reason of the universe, the incarnate rational principle.

I am sorry, but that is not at all the same theology — and therefore not the same divine concepts.

Some translators have tried other things. Martin Buber, for example, the 20th-century philosopher, translating John into German, proposes another rendering.

I will not read it aloud for obvious reasons, because I would absolutely butcher all the words. In fact, that is why I do not say every phrase in the video — to avoid that kind of problem.

And Buber adds a footnote to explain the word. He says one rendering is not enough, and that one should also hear in it the ideas of meaning and reason.

He knows that he is betraying the text; he accepts it — but at least he says so.

Now let us move on to Hebrew.

In Genesis, at the very beginning, God creates the world, and at one point it is written: “Most translations say the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.”

Except that this word does not mean only spirit; it also means breath. It is wind. It is that which is both material and immaterial. You can feel the wind, but you cannot seize it.

To translate this word as spirit is to spiritualize something fundamentally ambivalent. One chooses a Platonic interpretation in which spirit is opposed to matter.

As a little mnemonic reminder, think of that painting where Plato points upward to signify spirit, heaven, immaterial ideas — while beside him Aristotle is oriented more toward the material, the earth, the concrete.

In biblical Hebrew, this opposition between spirit and matter does not exist. The word is both at once. It is the breath of God, both physical and divine.

Some modern translations try to preserve this ambiguity. They say “the breath of God” or “the wind of God.”

But even there it remains a little confused, because in French, breath and wind do not carry the same symbolic weight as that original word. You do not reconstruct three thousand years of religious culture with one word.

Then there is the word metanoia. This is a Greek word from the New Testament, usually translated as repentance.

But metanoia is meta — after, beyond — and nous — mind or thought. It is a change of mind.

When John the Baptist preaches and says metanoeite, he is not saying, “Repent of your sins and feel guilty.” He is saying rather, “Turn your mind around.” In other words, change the way you see the world.

And that is far more transformative.

In French, repentance evokes guilt or remorse over one’s faults. But metanoia is almost of the order of awakening. It has nothing to do with simple guilt.

Master Eckhart in the 14th century was already speaking of the necessity of changing one’s gaze rather than merely repenting.

But the dominant translation — the one that shaped centuries of Christian preaching — is repentance.

Millions of believers have lived their faith as chronic guilt rather than as a joyful transformation of consciousness.

Do you see a little of what is happening?

Every translation imposes a worldview.

The translator makes choices. He privileges certain dimensions of the original word and sacrifices others.

These choices have enormous consequences. They shape the way people think about God, good, evil, and existence.

Walter Benjamin, the philosopher, wrote a magnificent text in 1923: “The Task of the Translator.”

He says there are two ways of translating.

The first is what he calls communicative translation. One reformulates in the target language so that it is understandable. But in doing so, one loses the strangeness of the original, because one makes it fit into the categories of one’s own language.

The second way is what he calls literal translation. One remains as close as possible to the syntax and therefore the rhythm of the original. Even if it sounds strange, something of the original shines through.

Benjamin goes further. He says that all languages are fragments of an original language that existed before Babel, and that the translator’s task is to make those fragments dialogue with one another, to let them resonate together, to create an in-between space where both languages coexist, even if it is uncomfortable.

But most translations do not do that; they prefer to simplify.

And the reader who reads only the translation does not even know that a choice was made, because he thinks he is reading the original text. He thinks he is directly accessing what the author meant, but he is reading only one version among others.

And the worst part is that the more a text is translated, the more it moves away from its original meaning, because translations are often made from another translation.

The Bible, for example — how many French versions are translations of Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, itself a translation of Hebrew and Greek?

A translation of a translation of a translation.

At every stage, more nuance is lost, and in the end what remains only vaguely resembles the original.

That does not mean one should not translate — that would be absurd. Translation is necessary. It allows the circulation of ideas and the meeting of cultures.

That, I acknowledge.

But one must keep in mind that translating will always remain an act of interpretation.

And when one translates texts that claim to say something about God, the origin of the world, and existence, then what one is translating are visions of reality.

Chapter 7: Sacred Texts and Their Incompatible Interpretations

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, rediscovering the language spoken before Babel is the Adamic dream — the language that existed before God confused human tongues in punishment for pride.

Let us return to Genesis.

Adam names the animals. That is not a trivial act, because to name is to exercise power over reality: we fix the essence of things.

And if Adam was able to name rightly, it is because he spoke the perfect language — the language in which the name and the thing are one. There is therefore no translation and no differing interpretation.

Remember Walter Benjamin: he says that in this original language, things give themselves in their linguistic being. In other words, the word lion does not designate the animal — it is the animal in its essential truth.

The idea goes even further in certain traditions: it is the language in which God created the world. Our famous logos from the beginning of the Gospel.

The Word — that is, speech — is thus the very act of creation. God says, “Let there be light,” and there is light. The world emerges from language.

In Islam, Qur’anic Arabic is perceived as the language in which God expressed Himself directly, without intermediary. The Qur’an is inimitable, untranslatable in its linguistic perfection. Every translation is necessarily a betrayal, a degradation of divine speech.

So there is something in all of this that troubles me a little.

If God exists, if He wishes to reveal Himself to human beings, if He wants to be understood — and I mean perfectly understood — then why did He choose language?

Human language is imperfect, ambiguous, subject to translation, interpretation, misunderstanding.

Why not reveal Himself directly in the mind of each person? If God is universal and immutable, how can He allow Himself to be enclosed within linguistic structures that are contingent, historical, and cultural?

Chapter 8: Why Did God Choose Language?

How can He accept that His message be distorted, betrayed by successive translations?

Some believers answer that one must return to the original languages: read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, the Qur’an in Arabic.

But even there, there is still a problem, because biblical Hebrew itself is ambiguous. The vowels were added centuries after the consonants. The meaning of certain words has been lost. There are passages whose meaning no one is truly sure of.

And then — who decides the correct interpretation?

Everyone has his own reading and defends his version.

Other believers say that what matters is not the letter, but the spirit. That God inspires the reader, and that truth is not in the exact words but in the deeper meaning that shines through them.

But wait — I have not yet spoken to you about a tradition that understood that language may be inadequate for speaking about God.

It is called negative theology, or apophatic theology, from the Greek apophasis, negation.

More precisely, it insists more on what God is not than on what God is.

God is not limited. He is not mortal. He is not material. He is not even comprehensible.

And therefore to say what He is — well, that is impossible, because everything we might say would reduce Him. It would imprison Him within our human categories. We would begin entering into an anthropomorphic delirium — in other words, attributing human characteristics, behavior, or form to God.

To say “God is good” is to project our human concept of goodness onto God.

But God, if He exists, infinitely surpasses our concept of goodness. He is not good in the way a human being is good. He is other — radically other.

And again, let us return to Meister Eckhart, because he goes even further in this direction. He says one must unlearn God — abandon all our images of God, all concepts, all representations. Because all of that is idolatry, mental constructions that prevent us from reaching the true God, the God beyond God.

And to reach Him, one must be silent. One must create silence within oneself. One must stop thinking with words.

In the course of my research, I discovered a magnificent analogy from a writer in Mystical Theology: the higher one rises toward God, the less one sees.

Why? Because He is too present, far too luminous.

Our concepts and our words are like eyes accustomed to dimness. When exposed to too intense a light, they are blinded.

So one cannot really speak of God.

I think that even if language is inadequate, it is the only tool we have — and perhaps also because one must begin somewhere.

Chapter 9: The Language of God

Language is like a finger pointing at the moon.

It is not the moon; it is only an indication. But without it, you would not know where to look.

Once you have seen the moon, you can forget the finger. But before that, you need it.

Perhaps that is the function of sacred texts: not to contain the truth, but to point toward it, to indicate a direction. Then it is up to us to walk, up to us to be silent and to directly experience what surpasses words.

But I still have another question on my mind.

If the absolute escapes language, then what can connect us to reality without passing through this flawed mediation that is language?

We are probably looking for the perfect language in the wrong place from the beginning.

It was never in words.

There is something truer, deeper, than anything we could say.

Do you know that feeling? Being with someone and sensing that everything has already been said, that words would be superfluous.

Even before the child speaks, he looks at his mother and understands. He reads in her eyes safety or fear, love or indifference.

No need for words — the gaze transmits directly, and that is already enough.

A hand on the shoulder of a grieving friend — that too is a language that needs no translation.

The body communicates.

And what about music? Through it I can convey all sorts of emotions. Music says nothing and everything at once. It touches us, makes us feel something words could never express.

And then, of course, there is direct experience: biting into a juicy fruit while contemplating a magnificent sunset, walking through a forest, hearing the rustling of leaves, seeing the light filtering through the branches.

You could try to describe all of that. You could say it was beautiful. But those words will never capture the totality of what you felt.

They will only be a pale copy.

The only truly universal language is the one that does not pass through symbols.

Language is extraordinary. Language made civilization, science, art, philosophy possible. Without it, we would know nothing.

But at the same time, language may be what places a layer of concepts between us and raw experience — what makes us live in a world of representation rather than a world of sensation.

I think Einstein said that his greatest discoveries did not come from calculation, but from intuition, from nonverbal mental vision. He saw images, sensations of movement, and only afterward translated all of that into equations. Mathematical language came later.

Educate yourselves — but also learn to be silent, to listen, and to feel.

See the world without naming it.

Meet the other without reducing them to what you think you know about them.

In the end, perhaps we do have our answer to the language of God: the language that does not merely speak, but feels and lives. The language that does not separate mind from body, the word from the thing, the sign from the world.

Chapter 10: Conclusion

Frederick II’s children died for lack of presence and lack of affection.

The only true language is love — the love we embody.

That is why Wittgenstein fell silent: because he had understood that the most important things cannot be said.

They can only be lived.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Yes — but one must also live it.