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Articles · Babel

The long-form series.

A LinkedIn-syndicated essay series on the impact of language in technology. First-person voice; canonical versions live here. Each article stands on its own; the series is the unit of work.

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Listening to Spanish Again

The personal predecessor. A customer talking about Microsoft Mesh, a Rioplatense word for what the technical vocabulary refused to let through, and the moment that turned an observation into a research project.

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What Technical Vocabulary Refuses to Carry

The series-aperture observation. Technical vocabulary as a register that suppresses cultural-historical weight, with worked examples from Spanish (quilombo, trapito) and English (daemon, cookie, fork).

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I Thought I Was the First. I Was the Fifth.

The lineage discovery. Story-form. What a pre-publication verification pass found: Perligata (2000), Espro (2015), Tampio (~2017), Wenyan (2019) — and how a research project gets stronger by surviving its own verification.

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Two Be-Verbs for Two Kinds of Equals

First technical deep-dive. Spanish has two copulas (ser, estar) where English has one; the distinction maps directly to immutable vs mutable bindings. Inflexión's cleanest of six grammatical-semantic mappings — the verb at the binding site IS the type discipline.

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Three Stances Toward a Statement

Mood as evaluation strategy. The Creo que es / No creo que sea indicative-subjunctive flip on negation, mapped to eager / deferred / effect evaluation in Inflexión. The most novel of the six mappings — Spanish-speakers must shift from thinking of subjunctive as 'unasserted' to thinking of it as 'deferred.'

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One Verb, Two Computations

Aspect deep-dive. Cuando llegué, mi madre cocinaba — perfective and imperfective in one Spanish sentence, mapped to eager and lazy evaluation on the same operation in Inflexión. The smallest of the six mappings: a single morphological choice on the verb suffix carries the entire eager-versus-lazy semantic distinction.

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When the Verb Carries Its Own Arguments

Clitic ordering deep-dive. Dámelo, dáselo, dámela — Spanish clitics attach to verbs in a fixed grammaticalised order (SE > 2nd > 1st > 3rd) and route arguments by position in that order. The most syntactically novel of Inflexión's six mappings; the hardest of the technical articles for non-Spanish-speakers, and the one with the largest payoff if the reader can see what is going on.

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A Cafecito Is Not Just a Small Coffee

Diminutive and augmentative deep-dive. Cafecito, ratito, busquito, buscazo — Spanish diminutive/augmentative morphology marks size and cultural register together, and Inflexión maps it to numeric scaling and cheap-versus-thorough function variants. The most playful of Inflexión's six mappings, and the one that drags Spanish's affectionate in-group register into the code's character.

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The Article Already Knows

Number agreement deep-dive. El precio, los precios — Spanish marks number on articles, nouns, adjectives, and verbs in lockstep, and Inflexión makes the concord carry the scalar-versus-collection distinction. The most pervasive of the six mappings, the substrate the other five sit on, and the closing piece of the series's technical curriculum.