In many languages, certainly those that derive from Indo-European, the verb “to be” plays a fundamental role as it is the pivot of all sentences that can be true and false and, therefore, is decisive to the description of reality. But if we ask ourselves what its meaning is, we realize that it doesn't have one of its own: it simply unites the subject to the predicate. Furthermore, this very short word (“is”) has given rise to an important strand of philosophy, since its beginnings with Parmenides. Martin Heidegger devoted all his philosophical research to answering the question: “What is the meaning of being?”.
Analyzing some crucial phases of his thought, this paper brings up some hypotheses on the role that language played in characterizing the nature of man in the space where his animality and his spirituality meet.