Foreignisms / AI or IA?

I acknowledge that languages influence one another.

I acknowledge that English has become the “Esperanto” of the financial market and of international trade, and it is not even worth discussing this, besides using many abbreviated terms and practical words, such as A.S.A.P., OK, “Help”. The same happens with new words, created and/or adapted to meet the demands of technological novelties, such as, for example, “blogue”, which is still a “diary for others to read” (web-log, shortened to blog). Would it be “record”? The first language to create / spread it, will make it valid.

It cannot be denied that the R.S.V.P. and the “merde” from French, the “ciao” from Italian, the “quizás” from Spanish, immortalized by the Black American Nat King Cole, and other terms that seem made for certain things or moments, we all adopt them “in a good way”.

But unnecessary foreignisms, in our Portuguese, bother me. I do not go so far as to say “ludopédio”, but I do not like the submissive acceptance of foreignism.

Even more when used, unnecessarily, gracelessly, due to cultural limitation (lack of vocabulary) or as subservient snobbery, even without realizing it.

Why say “tsunami”, which, it seems, many languages, for lack of their own term, adopted from Japanese, if in our Portuguese we have “maremoto”?

Does a “delivery” arrive faster than an “entrega”?

And the “equity”, said at negotiation tables instead of “capital contribution”, just to impress the participants?

And when sizes are said in “inches”, which is not even a decimal system?

They are exhibitors, with the mongrel complex (*) that plagues the country, for whom, if the narrative is in a foreign language, any nonsense seems intelligent.

As a corollary, the mania of quoting foreign “specialists” and “scientists”, to give support to opinions “of the moment” (“fashionable”), almost never questioned, but adopted by the tribes to which each one wants to belong or appear: “global warming”, the “vaccines that do harm”, “flat-earthism”, “fake news” (always from others), and so on.

So, my trip to São Paulo, at the beginning of the spring of 2025, on a LATAM flight, started badly: the plane had barely stabilized at cruising altitude and the pilot thundered into the microphone for everyone to hear: “crew: ten thousand feet”. Since these flights are regulated by ANAC, it became explicit that the Brazilian government does nothing against these cultural colonialisms, although it keeps shouting about our “self-determination”, our “pride”.

But the trip “was worth it”.

Besides seeing dear friends and colleagues again, I participated in a meeting-seminar of the ANE - National Academy of Engineering, at the centennial IE - Institute of Engineering, to honor some engineering students who submitted works to a contest promoted by the ANE and were selected. I also attended some interesting lectures.

It “was worth it” because of the lecture by Eng. Lawrence who, already an octogenarian, expressed his passion for life and for the career of engineer and “motivator”, infecting and moving the audience, including himself, even having his voice break (I discovered that I am not the only one with this reaction): “engineering is to serve humanity”, “and what if they turn off the wi-fi?”, “are we in the internet generation or in the age of the internet?”

It “was worth it” also because of the presentation of an ITA student, who had won one of the prizes, Maria Antônia. Confident in the presentation (a subject of control and instrumentation of small crops), with a rare precision of language, of our Portuguese and of her knowledge: whenever it would be to say Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is an international media nonsense “of the moment”, because that does not exist, she avoided it, and said Intelligent Automation (IA). After all, who will create the “boundary conditions”, who will select alternatives? And she did this about ten times. I l-o-v-e-d it.

I concluded that, despite everything, intelligent life and our culture will survive!

(*) Nelson Rodrigues in 1958: < by “mongrel complex” I mean the inferiority in which the Brazilian places himself, voluntarily, in relation to the rest of the world >.

Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer, chronicler and columnist, member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the Institute of Engineering # written on Sep 23, 2025 R2025 Oct Rf, 4,070 keystrokes.