Customer Reviews

Tuttle Concise Balinese Dictionary: Balinese-Indonesian-English English-Balinese-Indonesian

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A one or two word example in English is not sufficient to define a foreign word. Many words, especially in a non-European language like Balinese, do not have simple one-to-one correlations with English words, and, in fact, may represent ways of representing meanings that are unfamiliar to and utterly different than those use by English speakers. For example, in the Balinese-English section of this book, the author defines "darma" as pious or wise; "karma" as act. deed. These two words involve such complex ideas that whole books have been written about them. In the shorter English-Balinese section of the book, the author defines coconut as "enyuh." In fact, the Balinese language distinguishes half a dozen or more words for coconut, depending upon the stage of maturity.

This book is, therefore, an extensive world list, not a dictionary, similar to, but much longer than, the kind of word list that one often finds at the end of a guidebook to a foreign country and is about as useful as such a guidebook list. The book represents that unpleasant aspect of popular thinking that requires complex ideas to be reduced to as few easily digestible morsels as possible. As such, it might be useful to a casual tourist, but certainly not to one who is serious about leaning the Balinese language