Customer Reviews

Macedonian-English/Englisg-Macedonian Concise Dictionary (Hippocrene Concise Dictionary)

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

 

 

It is very sad seeing Balkan politics sneaking even into this type of books. This book is just a mere political provocation, nothing else. The other reviewers are more than right. The book is not helpful at all if you plan to go to Macedonia. No one will understand you. For an excellent book on the Macedonian, see Christina Kramer : "Macedonian: A Course for Beginning and Intermediate Students". It gives you what you really need.

1: Look up the days of the week in the English section and you will find five; two are missing. Ditto the numbers zero through ten. Ditto the months of the year. 2: No attempt is made to distinguish among words. For instance, three words are given for "house" with no attempt to explain when a speaker would use one rather than another. Three words are also given for "home," two of which overlap the words for "house." I've used other concise dictionaries that, despite their small size, manage to express these differences. (See Langenscheidt's wonderful concise Latin-English dictionary, for instance.) In summary, a disappointment.

My wife and I took this book with us for a year in Macedonia. The choice of words in this dictionary was not good for daily life or for understanding newspapers. It was a very frustrating dictionary. We bought better ones in country but they are not easily available in the US. The Cyrillic alphabet information was useful, however. The blurb on the back about "whether you consider Macedonian a dialect of Bulgarian or a language in its own right" is by the way a breezy allusion to a major historic controversy. Most Macedonians would find it insulting, and they have suffered enough of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune so that they don't need the extra prickling of this one.

Not only does this book have all the limitations noted by the earlier reviewer (who clerly did NOT intend to rate it highly) this book is *the* dictionary for persons who want to carry "a provocation" in the Balkans. If you are buying this book you are probably either military or an aid worker going to the F.Y.R.O. Macedonia. Heck, if you were going to the Greek province of Macedonia, you would buy a Greek dictionary. If you were going to Bulgaria, you would buy a Bulgarian dictionary. Seem obvious? So why do I bring it up? Because this dictionary of "Macedonian" words does NOT always give you the words used by persons in F.Y.R.O. Macedonia! They'll give you Bulgarian words and other terms the locals won't understand. But the fun will really start when you show your English speaking Macedonian friends the dictionary you got the word from: read the back cover of this book and you'll find out why it gives you words they don't use in the place that you're going. It talks about "Macedonian" as possibly being a dialect of Bulgarian or a separate language--referencing on-going political conflicts between the F.Y.R.O.Macedonia and Bulgaria and Greece. Conflicts which the Macedonians perceive as threats to their existance as a nation, arguments about whether they exist as a people or as have an 'invented' history courtesy of Tito, etc. It's a sure-fire way to find yourself in the middle of a conversation about hot topics in Balkan politics when all you want to do is get around and speak a few words in FYROM. Someone should have told these authors to just give us the words the people in the area use and stop trying to be politically correct and inoffensive to the Greeks and Bulgarians. If they're offended by whether we can talk to the locals in their own words, they should get a life.

Why is that people who know better, and these authors obviously do know better, use the Greek name of Macedonia and Macedonian to describe a Slavic Language? People be aware, this book speaks the language of Krum the Barbarian, not that of Alexander the Great or Phillip II of Macedon.