Remarkably Adequate
Waaait a minute.
I recently spent a bunch of time laying down some data science (datum-scienco?) on some Portuguese text data for a collaboration with some researchers in Brazil. And this week, I finally sent out my results with some slight trepidation, given that I don't falo a palavro of Portuguese.
They responded seemingly positively:
"... I took a first look at the results and I think they are remarkably adequate to our purposes..."
But there's something quite chuckleworthy1 about the juxtaposition of "remarkably" and "adequate". It feels like a comical epitaph. Here lies Andy the Esperantist - he was remarkably adequate.
Hopefully, they're referring to the algorithm we tried out, rather than the issue being that my efforts were only just adequate and even that low bar was remarkable for me. Or perhaps they didn't quite intend the slightly negative shade of adequate at all 😆
Either way, it made me realise I didn't have a one-to-one mapping of the term "adequate" in Esperanto in my mind. Perhaps this?
rimarkinde sufiĉa
remarkably adequate
Sufiĉa means "enough" or "sufficient", so I think that's probably close enough. But you could go more towards the idea of "adequate" equating to "acceptable".
Have you ever thought about the difference between akceptinda & akceptebla ? If you ask the dictionary at lernu.net for a translation of the word "acceptable", it'll give you both alternatives without further clarification. But you won't find akceptinda at vortaro.net except for a couple casual usages in the definitions of other words.
They are both derived from the verb akcepti "to accept", except that one uses the -ind "worthy of x" suffix, and the other the -ebl suffix "possible to x". Which gives us two shades of meaning:
akceptinda
acceptable (worth accepting)
akceptebla
acceptable (possible to accept)
The latter, in my mind, is clearly being more guarded with praise!
la alie mallerta sciencisto provizis rimarkinde akcepteblan analizon
the otherwise inept scientist provided a remarkably adequate analysis
1 Subridinda? From ridi "to laugh" plus sub "under" (see subridi), with the -ind suffix "worthy of". Worthy of a sneaky laugh. Chuckleworthy.
