Gray and cold with strong, chilling winds this first of May, jeden maju, so unspringlike as to keep me adesk with the Kosciuszko dictionary. I’m perusing A in search of adjectives and adverbs. Some champions of prose insist upon a style with a minimum of description, as if quality admitted no nuance, no shading of nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates by such modifiers. Say “yes” when you mean “yes” and “no “ when you mean “no.” Modification is for amateurs. So be criticism—I love adjectives and adverbs. To me, little in this life appears clean and unqualified, and I prefer to rag in detail, not infinitely, of course, about life’s and language’s still freshly ragged edges, deft tones, and hues evanescent.
Through A I copy, tally, and notice among ninety adjectives and adjective/adverb pairs a preponderance of cognates: absolutny, abstrakcyjny, absurdalny, adekwatny, administracyjny, afirmatywny …. Sweet. Finally, something about the language that doesn’t push complexity to the nth degree. And, not unlike English, the adverb forms are pretty regular and recognizable; absolutnie, absurdalnie, agresywnie, aktualnie, aktywnie, and even more sweetly, adverbs don’t decline like adjectives. They’re always the same. Some tricks, to be sure, must attend to finding and fastening the appropriate ending to an adjective—ny, yjny, alny, czny, wny—but the challenges here seem manageable. Only a few adjectives in my list do not call to mind, in due time, their English counterpart: adamowy (“stark naked”), aksamitny (“velvety”), antywojenny (“antiwar”), aspoleczny (“asocial”), and autowy (“out” as in sports’ “out-of-bounds”). Most of the cognate adjectives are imports. The less recognizable words have deeper native, Slavic roots. Except for autowy, which looks like something having to do with cars, but is, most likely, an echoic import—Out!
