The tongue is a bundle of muscles with no bone inside
Eight muscles weave through the tongue: four inside it, and four that arrive from outside. Together they bend, flatten, point, and pull it back. No bone runs down the middle.
That makes the tongue a muscular hydrostat, the same class of organ as an elephant trunk. It changes shape by squeezing itself, because muscle is mostly water and water does not compress.
Speech and swallowing depend on that boneless knot. The hyoid bone nearby is an anchor outside it, not a spine inside it.
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