What the jebac! Sometimes that’s all you can say.
So this week we have been learning to tell time, which means we’ve begun to learn the Polish number system. Normally, with less intricate languages, you take up counting in week one or two, along with the alphabet. Not so, and rightfully, with Polish. Were you to encounter the arcana that is Polish numeracy in “week one, the first” (jedna, pierwsza agreeing in number and gender with tygodnia, “week”) you would have any number of reasons to abandon the enterprise immediately. Our instructor, who regularly insists that Polish operates with mathematical precision, has granted that on the topic of number, well, it’s “hairy”—a term I don’t recall from algebra. The author of our textbook, Oscar Swan, in his Polish Grammar, devotes an entire chapter to its problems and nuances: “Numerals are a kind of determiner…whose declension and use are complex enough to merit special treatment.” (p. 189) Ironic that the language’s claim to a pristine mathematics founders on the subject of number. Not that languages aren’t regular and orderly; only that they are history as well, and history is a effing mess.
The number 1 is simple enough, taking regular adjectival endings depending on the gender (and, surprise! the number) of the noun: jeden (m.), jedna (f.), and jedno (n.). Jeden pies (one dog), jedna ryba (one fish), jedno zwierze (one animal). A fairly straightforward trinity of genders subsumed under a recognizable One. Oddly, there is a plural adjectival form of “one,” jedne, illogical but made grammatically necessary by certain nouns in Polish that exist only as plurals. For example, the word for “door” in Polish, drzwi, is a plural form derived, if I recall correctly, from its reference to French doors, which are double. (It might also derive from the problem of trying to pronounce what would seem to be the singular, drzw.) This complication we cannot blame on the number system itself, but on exceptional nouns, of which there are not a few. Mezczyzna and kolega, “man” and “colleague,” are masculine nouns with feminine endings; so that they take masculine modifiers, even as the words themselves decline as feminine nouns. Ergo, jeden mezczyzna and jeden kolega, not jedna mezczyzna and jedna kolega, as you might expect. But I digress.
The number 2 offers two forms, dwa (for masculine and neuter nouns) and dwie (for feminine nouns). Why the masculine and neuter are collapsed before what appears to be a feminine ending and why dwie looks not in the least feminine are not altogether clear. It’s hairy, I presume, and only gets hairier. As our text notes, “The numbers dwa/dwie, trzy [3], cztery [4] take the Nominative plural of the quantified noun…. Numbers 5 and above take the Genitive plural.” (p. 114) Fascinating. As if, at a certain point, specifically 5, number acquires a somewhat different conceptual or perceptual character. You have one dog, two cats, three kids, four parking tickets, but you have five—or more, up to 900 in Polish—of anything else. At the height of the Cold War, then President Jimmy Carter tried to negotiate reductions in nuclear stockpiles with the Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev. He argued that fewer, higher quality weapons (missiles with MIRVed warheads) would be preferable to mass quantities of single, large kiloton warheads. Brezhnev replied, “Quantity has a quality all of its own,” which I thought at the time one of the wittiest and profoundest things I’d ever read—wit and profundity not being something you’d normally expect from a Central Committee Chairman. And here, he may only have been uttering a commonplace of Slavic grammar.
And how about this, though hardly the last word on the hirsute punctiliousness of Polish enumeracy: “In longer compound numerals, in principle all items are declined.” (Swan, Grammar, p. 199) That is to say, when you have a large number descriptor, 10,587 things to remember about the Polish language, the individual numbers embedded in the compound numeral—ten thousand, five hundred, eighty, and seven—all have to agree in gender and case with the thing enumerated. By illustration, Professor Polakiewicz related that once when he was teaching in Poland at Lublin, he attended a State of the University Address by the rector. In listing the university’s many achievements during the year, including numbers of students, of degrees awarded, credit hours taught, etc. etc. the rector paused, stumbled, erred, corrected, back-tracked, but eventually survived that ridiculous obstacle course of data, probably at last to considerable applause, not for the loftiness of the rhetoric, but for the mere correctness of his grammar. When the chief academic officer of a major university struggles minutes at a time with the niceties of his own language, second-language learners take heed.
p.s. One of Swan’s paragraph headings: “Five ways of saying ‘three students.’”
