Standard English-SerboCroatian, SerboCroatian-English Dictionary: A Dictionary of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Standards [Paperback]

Morton Benson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 13, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0521645530 | ISBN-13: 978-0521645539

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Even in the 1990s, when Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia are forming their own standard languages, Morton Benson's dictionaries still give the best available coverage of the vocabulary and are the most helpful to the foreign learner." Wayles Browne, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Cornell University

"It is a pleasure to express the judgment that this work is a model of lexicographic excellence." Library Journal

"This work...belongs on the shelf of every student of SerboCroatian. Highly recommended." Choice

Language Notes

Text: English, Serbo-Croation --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 798 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (July 13, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521645530
• ISBN-13: 978-0521645539
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,009,011 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #4 in Books > Education & Reference > Dictionaries & Thesauruses > Foreign Language > Serbo-Croatian
  • #34 in Books > Education & Reference > Foreign Languages > Instruction > Serbo-Croatian
  • #36 in Books > Education & Reference > Foreign Languages > Serbo-Croatian

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very good and practical reference, November 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Standard English-SerboCroatian, SerboCroatian-English Dictionary: A Dictionary of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Standards (Hardcover)

Benson's Serbo-Croatian dictionaries are well-written, and fairly thorough. Since the breakup of the Former Yugoslavia, translation references have been difficult to obtain, publishers out of business, trade embargos, etc. For a student, this is a truly superb reference. For a professional translater, it is quite practical, though not as exhaustively thorough as some others published in the 1980s. As a professional translator, I highly reccomend this reference.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, February 19, 2001

By 

Dave (Wellington, New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Standard English-SerboCroatian, SerboCroatian-English Dictionary: A Dictionary of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Standards (Paperback)

Morton Benson has produced some fine dictionaries, but this isn't one of them.

There's very little help with irregularities. For example, I would expect, that if the present tense of a verb isn't formed by swapping "-ti" in the infinitive with "-m" etc, that there'd be some kind of indication of this. Otherwise, you look up a verb in the English to S-C secion, and you have no idea whether you're using it right. There's no indication of when a noun is not of the "expected" gender (that is, female nouns ending with consonants, male nouns ending with -o or -a, etc). There's no indication of verb aspect (svrs^eni i nesvrs^eni vid), which frankly, is really important for a speaker of English. Often, only the perfective (svrs^eni) form, or only the imperfective (nesvrs^eni) form is given. Consequently, it's far too frequent that one can look up a verb in the S-C to English section and just not find it.

Also, although one would expect from the title of the book that it's going to be helpful with Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian, it seldom gives an indication of which word is which. The best you can expect is occasionally to see (W) next to the Croatian form, a convention that's not actually explained anywhere in the book. If several words are listed, there's no way to tell which is commonly used in Serbia, and which is commonly used in Bosnia. As I would like eventually to speak and understand the Bosnian dialect, this is pretty useless.

Lastly, this dictionary gives an impression of having been written "in a hurry". There are lots of little details that aren't quite right. Couldn't they even have put the pages in the right order?

If freight costs between NZ and USA weren't so prohibitive, I would have returned this book to Amazon. It's rather a waste of space on my bookshelf.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not good for English-speakers wanting to learn Serbo-Croat, February 20, 2006

By 

kjellnilsson (Orebro Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Standard English-SerboCroatian, SerboCroatian-English Dictionary: A Dictionary of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Standards (Paperback)

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.