SerboCroatian English Dictionary

Rating:
Summary: Best, most comprehensive dictionary available
Review: As the other reviewers have pointed out, there are flaws with this dictionary, but there are flaws with any dictionary that is printed. Especially in today's world, we cannot expect a "Serbo-Croatian" dictionary to please everybody. Most people will not agree that Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are the same language. It is impossible to list every single difference between the different dialects of former Yugoslavia. I have studied and taught this language for over ten years, and there are too many differences to be pointed out in a dictionary. You must understand that this dictionary was written when there was a "knjizevni" serbo-croatian language. That is the language that this dictionary is based on. If you cannot live with that, then you need to find a different dictionary, or better yet, sit down and create your own.

Rating:
Summary: Best, most comprehensive dictionary available
Review: As the other reviewers have pointed out, there are flaws with this dictionary, but there are flaws with any dictionary that is printed. Especially in today's world, we cannot expect a "Serbo-Croatian" dictionary to please everybody. Most people will not agree that Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are the same language. It is impossible to list every single difference between the different dialects of former Yugoslavia. I have studied and taught this language for over ten years, and there are too many differences to be pointed out in a dictionary. You must understand that this dictionary was written when there was a "knjizevni" serbo-croatian language. That is the language that this dictionary is based on. If you cannot live with that, then you need to find a different dictionary, or better yet, sit down and create your own.

Rating:
Summary: Still the best Serbo-Croatian dictionary out there, bar none
Review: For a beautiful language that is out of the way for most English speakers, Morton Benson produced a classic I wish everyone else in foreign langage dictionary publishing would emulate. (I've been dreaming since 1993 of a Benson-quality analogue for Romanian...)

Are there flaws? Sure. The "see the other entry" habit a previous reviewer mentioned is time-consuming and often requires a great deal of thought when deciphering the meaning of, say, similar verbs with the same roots but different prefixes. Also, I would've liked to see more explicit definitions of verbs frequently converted to their gerund form, instead of having to arrive at my best "guess-timation" in some not-so-easy situations.

Most other gripes remain the exclusive business of literary experts. (Particularly gripes about the real or imagined separation of Serbo-Croatian into separate, non-hyphenated languages; most of these arguments have more to do with nationalist projects on angry tangents than logic or linguistic history.)

For serious non-native students of the language like myself (a political scientist), I have yet to see anything remotely close to the Benson, let alone better, although there may well be a few out of print rarities in used book shops in the former Yugoslavia.

Very few dictionaries of any non-major foreign language go into the grammatical, let alone regional, detail that Benson does in the entries themselves (particularly past tenses and participles) and a wide range of expressions (even though it is not intended to be a real phraseological dictionary). He also includes an excellent, quick and dirty reference of cases and grammatical endings for nouns and adjectives in the back (nice, you can leave your textbook photocopies at home). The preface contains several rules concerning verb behavior that I have found immensely helpful.

This Benson is frequently found as part of a 2 volume set, one volume on Serbo-Croatian to English, the other volume as the reverse (English to Serbo-Croatian). They're rather large in size and pricey, but *worth every penny* if you have any sustained need to understand Serbo-Croatian beyond a short tourist trip. My copy is rather battered and overly thumbed, but rates as important a place as my underwear in my backpack on every trip to Serbia. (I even bought a backup copy in Belgrade--much cheaper, but also on cheaper paper). Look around for deals offering both volumes together--I think I got mine in 1995 directly off Cambridge UP for not much more than the current price for one (90 dollars).

There is also an earlier version of the Benson produced in the early 1980s, I believe--smaller, going from S-C to English to back, in one much more portable volume, but it does not have the grammatical details so vital to the bigger Benson, and it certainly falls far shorter on the number of words. Every teacher I know recommends the "big Benson" for the serious student.

I just wish more publishers served language students with the quality of the Cambridge UP Benson, instead of foisting cheap, frustratingly useless junk on starved niche markets, like Hippocrene routinely does. You can *always* find better than a Hippocrene in the new or used book shops of the target country, and if you're going to visit anyway...buy it there.

Rating:
Summary: Is this the best we can do?
Review: For the Belgrade ("Serbian") variety of the language, this is the best dictionary available. Alas, that's not saying much. Benson seems to rely on literature more than the living spoken language, which may explain the many outdated and archaic forms that are presented without being so identified. Just one example: frka is glossed as "snort, snorting of a horse." But in modern Serbian, that would be frkanje, which Benson does not list. (The modern meaning of frka is "ruckus, fuss, ado"; again, omitted by Benson.)

But the one failing of this dictionary that I find unforgiveable is the abuse of the word "see." It is so common to look up a word in Benson only to find nothing but an instruction to "see" some other entry that we have a joke among Serbian translators: Benson induces "see"-sickness. And the worst of it is, often the entry you're told to "see" is an inadequate synonym for the word you need.

If Benson has a strength, it is in its meticulous attention to accentuation. You won't find that in any other English dictionary.

Rating:
Summary: Is this the best we can do?
Review: For the Belgrade ("Serbian") variety of the language, this is the best dictionary available. Alas, that's not saying much. Benson seems to rely on literature more than the living spoken language, which may explain the many outdated and archaic forms that are presented without being so identified. Just one example: frka is glossed as "snort, snorting of a horse." But in modern Serbian, that would be frkanje, which Benson does not list. (The modern meaning of frka is "ruckus, fuss, ado"; again, omitted by Benson.)

But the one failing of this dictionary that I find unforgiveable is the abuse of the word "see." It is so common to look up a word in Benson only to find nothing but an instruction to "see" some other entry that we have a joke among Serbian translators: Benson induces "see"-sickness. And the worst of it is, often the entry you're told to "see" is an inadequate synonym for the word you need.

If Benson has a strength, it is in its meticulous attention to accentuation. You won't find that in any other English dictionary.

Rating:
Summary: The winds of cold war in lexicography
Review: Milosav Popadic - writer from Sarajevo, now living in Helsingborg, Sweden. My address is Donationsgatan 8A, S-254 43 Helsingborg, Sweden. I have no e-mail, but commentaries could be sent to [e-mail]

The Winds of Cold War in Lexicography*

The time is out of joint: O, cursed spite That I ever was born to set it right. Hamlet

Benson's Serbocroatian-English Dictionary - which now appaers in CD-ROM form - was written in the 1960-ies, first edition by "Prosveta" Belgrade 1970. It contains about 60 000 entries covering more or less all the fileds of human activity. One can use it for a long time and be satisfied with it, but the more one uses it the one gets tired of the manner in which Benson treats Serbian and the Serbs. It is a typical cold war book. And although the cold war is said to be over, the author seems to have been busy with other projects, because he made few if any corrections in subsequent editions, including the CD-ROM. M.Benson is inconsiderate not only with respect to the Srebs, but also to all the users of his book, as will be shown in continuation. Its advantages are few, but let's name them straight away. First, it is comprehensive and universal; second, Serbian words are accentuated, and third, the CD-ROM gives orally pronunciation of Serbian words, which will no doubt be of some help to the foreign user. Unfortunately, the disadvantages are more numerous and must be broken into several groups: a) falws in method; b) flaws in knowledge; c) neologisms; d) cold war arrogance Benson's Dictionary suffers from the following flaws: A) Flaws in Method : a) verb: both verbal aspects are given under the form which alphabetically appears first, which is wrong for several reasons: 1) the perfective and the imperfective forms do not belong to the same declination type, e.g. dati - dam; davati - dajem ; 2) the perfective and the imperfective forms often are not synonyms: uteci - run away; uticati (of rivers, brooks, etc) - discharge [its waters into], and, besides, uticati means also influence, which is to say that each verb should be given under its own entry; b) the noun: contrary to modern practice in lexicography, the feminine forms of the noun (with a few exceptions) are given under the masculine: there is no justification to give car - carica, kralj - kraljica under separate entries and bakalinka under bakal; gradjanka under gradjanin, etc; c) the adjective: It is equally wrong to give derived adjectives under the entry of the noun: junacki (heroic) is registered under junak (hero), with no examples, and the user is at a loss how to use it. All the words deserving a place in a dictionary deserve a separate entry. B) Flaws in Knowledge: 1) distortions: Benson is quite reliable with police and military terms, but not so in everyday terms, his plant and animal trems are sometimes unreliable. What is even worse, Benson distorts the meaning of words: according to him, balkanac = crude person , and in fact it means: inhabitant of the Balkans; 2) uncertainty: even where there is no cold war arrogance, Benson is often unreliable: duguljast does not mean longish , as Benson has it, but oblong (it describes form and not length!); we say fluor and not fluorid. The word sagovornik (interlocutor) is translated by Benson as collocutor (which does not exist in English) and conversationalist, which is not synonymous with interlocutor; 3) missing words: many important words are missing: e.g. kunica (marten), mobil telefon (pager), razmnozavanje (propagation) [the list is long]; C) neologisms : Benson uses many neologisms, some of which - I am almost certain - he personally invented, e.g. rusenje - russification , being homonymous with rusenje - destruction seems to be in his taste [the list is extremely long]. D) cold war arrogance: Benson's Dictionary is saturated with cold war arrogance and malice. To achieve his aim, he uses the following strategem: 1) reduces the words of positive meaning to a single corresponding English word, with no examples: lepota - beauty; ponos - pride; postenje - honesty, etc; some positive words are completely missing: e.g.trajanje (duration) ; 2) words of neutral meaning are placed in a negative context: kupati se - bathe: kupati se u krvi - bathe in blood; kotrljati se - roll: glave ce se kotrljati - heads will roll; iznenadjenje - surprise: mina iznenadjenja - booby trap, etc! (the list is long!); 3) words of negative meaning are placed in extremely drastic context: glad - hunger: umreti od gladi - die of hunger; poginuti - get killed: svi vojnici su poginuli - all the soldiers have been killed; osuditi - sentence: osuditi na smrt - sentence to death, etc; udariti - attack, hit, kick: udariti na Beograd - atack Belgrade (this was written in the sixties, four decades before NATO's massive strikes!); 4) in order to get as drastic as possible syntagms, Benson removes the difference between figurative and basic meaning of the word: osusiti - dry: osusiti nekome opanke - kill somebody (he might have found this as a bad metaphor in a story, but it has no dictionary meaning at all); 5) local population is regularly placed in a negative context: smrznuti se - get frozen: smrzli smo se u hladnoj sobi - we got frozen in the cold room; ostatak- remainder, rest: jesti ostatke - eat leftovers, etc. (I have written a 70 page long essay in English on the defects of this book.) It is sad that such books are written in our time; it is even sadder that they have been printed in Belgrade and that Benson's dictionaries in Belgrade are a synonym of high quality (characteristically, his Dictionary has never been published in Zagreb in spite of the fact that it is called Serbocroatian-English Dictionary and contains all the Croatian variants) and it is saddest that - in spite of the fact that there are competent lexicographers among the Serbs - Benson's is at the moment the best available Serbian-English dictionary. It is high time for the Serbs to pay efforts to make a reliable (and free of cold war arrogance) comprehensive Srebian-English dictionary. Benson's is ideologically distorted and deplorably unreliable. _______________ * [MORTON-BENSON] [srpskohrvatsko-engleski recnik] [KOS & CO - Elekronske produkcije]