Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I've bought the paperback-version of this dictionary, so it could be that the hardcover (?) version is much better and more complete.

First of all some positive remarks: * It's a handy (though pretty heavy) dictionary; simple font and layout, but very readable. * A large amount of words and verbs.

If you want to look up quickly the meaning of a word, or if you want to understand the basics of a text, this dictionary is an excellent match. But if you're looking for more; for more phrases, examples of pronunciation or daily communication, or perhaps the basics of Serbo-Croatian grammar, Morton Benson's dictionary won't be very helpful.

* SERBIAN & CROATIAN. It's called "A dictionary of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian standards", but basically it's a Serbian dictionary with the Croatian variation in brackets. Another thing which can be very annoying are the endless references to the Serbian spelling: zvijezda > see zvezda = star, or: lijep > see lep = beautiful, pretty.

* BOSNIAN. Most people in Bosnia speak 'ijekavski', the Western (or Croatian) variation of a language we called in the past Serbo-Croatian. Though I'm not an expert on this field, Bosnian Moslems have their own linguistic variation, some call it a dialect, some call it slang, others call it a real language, which seems to be a mixture of the ijekavski- dialect and a lot of Turkish loan-words. But there's no trace of this Bosnian to find in Benson's dictionary, just ijekavski (Croatian) and ekavski (Serbian) are present. (Which doesn't mean that Benson's dictionary should be useless if you have to deal with Bosnian people, newspapers or internet-sites)

* VERBS. Benson's dictionary contains a lot of verbs, but... not a word about regular and irregular verbs or about feminine, neuter or masculine endings in the past tense. So if you for instance would like to know the meaning of 'je bila' (she was), this dictionary won't help you any further.

* NOUNS & ADJECTIVES. Here the same thing, like feminine, neuter and masculine declensions, which are characteristic for Slavonic languages, are completely ignored. Though it's a dictionary and not a grammar-book I think that at least some grammatical basics should have been mentioned. Like for example: kuca (f) = house, polje (n) = field, muz (m) = husband, or jak (m), jako (n), jaka (f) = strong.

* CENSORSHIP. I've never used or bought an American dictionary before, that's why I was kind of shocked when a friend of mine told me this story; You won't find any vulgarities or abusive words in American dictionaries for the morality's sake, even if these words are common used in all kinds of circles. I thought: "Long live this country of freedom and democracy, aj, boli mi kurac!" And if you want to know what that means, better don't buy Benson's dictionary ;-)

But if you're just looking for a huge list of words, then Benson's dictionary is real fine, vjeruj mi.

Although the title might not highlight its use for learning the Bosnian language, this dictionary is very helpful for that purpose.

We love the book. Especially the feature of using the word in a sentence. We did find a few 'mistakes'.

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.

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.

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).