Standard English-SerboCroatian, SerboCroatian-English Dictionary: A Dictionary of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Standards (Dictionary)
by Morton Benson
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List Price: $58.00
Our Price: $41.76
Your Save: $ 16.24 ( 28% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 491.82321
EAN: 9780521645539
ISBN: 0521645530
Label: Cambridge University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 344
Publication Date: 1998-07-13
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Studio: Cambridge University Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A "used" book in better shape than I imagined!
Comment: A "used" book in better shape than I imagined! This had been on a library shelf and had library reinforcement on the spine. It is very "new" in appearance and it is a bargain.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not good for English-speakers wanting to learn Serbo-Croat
Comment: The number of English-speakers who need to or want to learn Serbo-Croat is much lower than the number of Serbo-Croat speakers who want to learn English. And the market goes where the biggest bucks are to be made. Thus, in this dictionary the first section, from English to Serbo-Croat, runs to 452 pages. The second part, from Serbo-Croat to English, which will be most useful to a foreigner trying to learn to understand the language, is only 344 pages (The Amazon entry is therefore incorrect when it states that this book has 344 pages, when in reality it has 452 + 344 = 796 pages ! ). Moreover, the quality differs in the same way: the first part has phonetic transcriptions of the English lemmata, and grammatical tagging of them into word classes, etc. but there are no such features in the latter part except that it is indicated which word-class (noun, verb etc.) the lemma belongs to. This is a serious deficiency in a Slavic dictionary, where info about such things as the gender of nouns, or the aspect of verb forms, is so important. Several of the earlier reviews, written by native speakers of the language, point out various deficiencies in the translation of lemma, omission of specialized subvocabularies (swear-words, Turkish loanwords) etc. A number of words that appear in Montenegrin folksongs, which I needed to translate, were missing. So it definitely is not a comprehensive work.
But there are always trade-offs, and for this book the low cost must be mentioned as a definite plus, and it is well-printed on good-quality paper.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An addendum
Comment: Benson is a mixed blessing. Yet, better dictionaries will not be written as long as we live in tomato sized (we have no bananas) "states" and believe that Britney Spears equals culture...
How does the reader below substantiate his claim except by
ad hominem attacks?
Benson should have included more Turkicisms, yes...but how are Mesa Selimovic and Musa Cazim-Catic writing a language different from Andric's?
Well, let's grant our friend a moment of sheer heroism.
Hereby I declare my full willingness to challenge the reader below or anyone else preaching scientific (sic) objectivity while kneeling at the altar of nationalism.
I will leave my dictionaries and decorations at home, since reading a language involves time, love and labor; hence, more than professional envy and hatred.
Oh yes -- may my opponent pick a language and a literature most congenial to him, be it Turkish (including Ottoman), Persian or
Arabic. Or should it be Romance languages, since he is a Parisien by choice (let me guess...his heart's utmost desire is the EU, nothing more southern than Italy)?
I'll be generous and exlude Chinese, Latin and Nahuatl (aka Aztec for those of short memory).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Do not buy ever
Comment: Apparently, some of interpreters and translators have been commenting on the usage of Benson and it surprises me that they would say anything positive about this dictionary since, for as long as I remember, this community has been making fun of it. Benson is a bad dictionary maker. Period. If you use dictionary professionaly, and if it is unable to translate the word/phraze or a concept, it's absolutely useless, and Benson is full of such instances. I used to be shocked by some translations and used to wonder who ever let him write a dictionary.
The other source of misunderstanding between quality of a dictionary and some "I speak dozen languages" state of mind, is the phenomenon of a usage of dictionary itself: when you learn language, you buy a language learning book, dictionary as such is a reference book and it cannot help you if you're learning language, that is what immersion course does. You do not need dictionary if your level of language is beginner's, intermediate or upper intermediate, you have all vocabulary that you need in the book itself, so don't waste your money on dictionaries.
Since I am obviously not going to get involved with "Jugoostalgicari" who see attacks to this dictionary as an attack to their "nostalgija" I will however point out that one should first decide what language to study between Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian since they are not the same language. Sadly, there is no good Bosnian dictionary and one does have to have good dictionary of "turcisms" if one wants to explore that language, as at certain point communication either stops or becomes unnatural. As far as Croatian is concerned Bujas is absolutely the best dictionary ever (am translator for Bosnian/English/French/Arabic, so trust me on this), and I really wouldn't know what to recommend for Serbian since they are not so keen on advertising this stuff.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for pidgin lovers
Comment: I wouldn't comment on technical & pedagogical aspects of this book (nouns,declensions,adjectives etc.) other reviewers have amply elaborated on. As a native speaker of Croatian, I can see this book as (at best) an effort to give reader some basic stuff to linguistically get by in what used to be called "Serbian or Croatian diasystem" (funny phrase). I also found this dictionary funny- luckily I didn't have to learn from it.
But- as some reviewers pointed out, this is a basically Serbian dictionary. I don't intend to nitpick, but a few things have to be addressed:
-Croatian and Serbian are different standard languages. Bosnian is in the process of standardization, and will certainly achieve the stable norm in near future.
-there was not, ever, a "Serbo-Croatian" standard language. The same with "Portol" (Portuguese and Spanish), "Hurdu" (Hindi and Urdu), "Czechoslovakian" Czech and Slovak) or "Bulgaronian" (Bulgarian and Macedonian). These are similar languages which crystallized out of basically the same linguistic "prime matter"- as is the case with Swedish and Danish or Finnish and Hungarian. But to describe them as "variants of a language" (British and American English analogy is frequently (ab)used) is sheer nonsense.
-Croatian and Serbian differ in:
1. script (Latin and Cyrillic)
2. grammar and syntax (ca 200 different syntactic rules)
3. morphology (Croatian is a purist language, Serbian not. Moreover, even "internationalisms" like organize are different: organizirati in Croatian, organizovati in Serbian. Bosnian language tends, in this respect, to overlap with Croatian- but not entirely, since it was subject of forced Serbianization in past 50 years and more).
4. vocabulary (ca 20-30% of everyday vocabulary is different. The thesaurus of an average high school graduate is ca 40,000 to 50,000 words. Draw the conclusion).
So, this dictionary will, at best, make you an "expert" in "pidgin South-Slavic". If this is enough- buy it. If you want more-avoid it.
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Editorial Reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: A "used" book in better shape than I imagined!
Comment: A "used" book in better shape than I imagined! This had been on a library shelf and had library reinforcement on the spine. It is very "new" in appearance and it is a bargain.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not good for English-speakers wanting to learn Serbo-Croat
Comment: The number of English-speakers who need to or want to learn Serbo-Croat is much lower than the number of Serbo-Croat speakers who want to learn English. And the market goes where the biggest bucks are to be made. Thus, in this dictionary the first section, from English to Serbo-Croat, runs to 452 pages. The second part, from Serbo-Croat to English, which will be most useful to a foreigner trying to learn to understand the language, is only 344 pages (The Amazon entry is therefore incorrect when it states that this book has 344 pages, when in reality it has 452 + 344 = 796 pages ! ). Moreover, the quality differs in the same way: the first part has phonetic transcriptions of the English lemmata, and grammatical tagging of them into word classes, etc. but there are no such features in the latter part except that it is indicated which word-class (noun, verb etc.) the lemma belongs to. This is a serious deficiency in a Slavic dictionary, where info about such things as the gender of nouns, or the aspect of verb forms, is so important. Several of the earlier reviews, written by native speakers of the language, point out various deficiencies in the translation of lemma, omission of specialized subvocabularies (swear-words, Turkish loanwords) etc. A number of words that appear in Montenegrin folksongs, which I needed to translate, were missing. So it definitely is not a comprehensive work.
But there are always trade-offs, and for this book the low cost must be mentioned as a definite plus, and it is well-printed on good-quality paper.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An addendum
Comment: Benson is a mixed blessing. Yet, better dictionaries will not be written as long as we live in tomato sized (we have no bananas) "states" and believe that Britney Spears equals culture...
How does the reader below substantiate his claim except by
ad hominem attacks?
Benson should have included more Turkicisms, yes...but how are Mesa Selimovic and Musa Cazim-Catic writing a language different from Andric's?
Well, let's grant our friend a moment of sheer heroism.
Hereby I declare my full willingness to challenge the reader below or anyone else preaching scientific (sic) objectivity while kneeling at the altar of nationalism.
I will leave my dictionaries and decorations at home, since reading a language involves time, love and labor; hence, more than professional envy and hatred.
Oh yes -- may my opponent pick a language and a literature most congenial to him, be it Turkish (including Ottoman), Persian or
Arabic. Or should it be Romance languages, since he is a Parisien by choice (let me guess...his heart's utmost desire is the EU, nothing more southern than Italy)?
I'll be generous and exlude Chinese, Latin and Nahuatl (aka Aztec for those of short memory).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Do not buy ever
Comment: Apparently, some of interpreters and translators have been commenting on the usage of Benson and it surprises me that they would say anything positive about this dictionary since, for as long as I remember, this community has been making fun of it. Benson is a bad dictionary maker. Period. If you use dictionary professionaly, and if it is unable to translate the word/phraze or a concept, it's absolutely useless, and Benson is full of such instances. I used to be shocked by some translations and used to wonder who ever let him write a dictionary.
The other source of misunderstanding between quality of a dictionary and some "I speak dozen languages" state of mind, is the phenomenon of a usage of dictionary itself: when you learn language, you buy a language learning book, dictionary as such is a reference book and it cannot help you if you're learning language, that is what immersion course does. You do not need dictionary if your level of language is beginner's, intermediate or upper intermediate, you have all vocabulary that you need in the book itself, so don't waste your money on dictionaries.
Since I am obviously not going to get involved with "Jugoostalgicari" who see attacks to this dictionary as an attack to their "nostalgija" I will however point out that one should first decide what language to study between Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian since they are not the same language. Sadly, there is no good Bosnian dictionary and one does have to have good dictionary of "turcisms" if one wants to explore that language, as at certain point communication either stops or becomes unnatural. As far as Croatian is concerned Bujas is absolutely the best dictionary ever (am translator for Bosnian/English/French/Arabic, so trust me on this), and I really wouldn't know what to recommend for Serbian since they are not so keen on advertising this stuff.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for pidgin lovers
Comment: I wouldn't comment on technical & pedagogical aspects of this book (nouns,declensions,adjectives etc.) other reviewers have amply elaborated on. As a native speaker of Croatian, I can see this book as (at best) an effort to give reader some basic stuff to linguistically get by in what used to be called "Serbian or Croatian diasystem" (funny phrase). I also found this dictionary funny- luckily I didn't have to learn from it.
But- as some reviewers pointed out, this is a basically Serbian dictionary. I don't intend to nitpick, but a few things have to be addressed:
-Croatian and Serbian are different standard languages. Bosnian is in the process of standardization, and will certainly achieve the stable norm in near future.
-there was not, ever, a "Serbo-Croatian" standard language. The same with "Portol" (Portuguese and Spanish), "Hurdu" (Hindi and Urdu), "Czechoslovakian" Czech and Slovak) or "Bulgaronian" (Bulgarian and Macedonian). These are similar languages which crystallized out of basically the same linguistic "prime matter"- as is the case with Swedish and Danish or Finnish and Hungarian. But to describe them as "variants of a language" (British and American English analogy is frequently (ab)used) is sheer nonsense.
-Croatian and Serbian differ in:
1. script (Latin and Cyrillic)
2. grammar and syntax (ca 200 different syntactic rules)
3. morphology (Croatian is a purist language, Serbian not. Moreover, even "internationalisms" like organize are different: organizirati in Croatian, organizovati in Serbian. Bosnian language tends, in this respect, to overlap with Croatian- but not entirely, since it was subject of forced Serbianization in past 50 years and more).
4. vocabulary (ca 20-30% of everyday vocabulary is different. The thesaurus of an average high school graduate is ca 40,000 to 50,000 words. Draw the conclusion).
So, this dictionary will, at best, make you an "expert" in "pidgin South-Slavic". If this is enough- buy it. If you want more-avoid it.
This is the only dictionary of SerboCroatian-English to give both American and British English and to give coverage of all the standards of SerboCroatian, namely, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.
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