SEAlang Library Balinese Dictionary

SEAlang Library Balinese Dictionary

About the SEAlang Library Balinese Resources
SEAlang's Balinese dictionary is based on the Dictionary of Balinese - English by C. Clyde Barber (1979, Aberdeen University Library, Occasional Publications No. 2), used here by permission of the University of Aberdeen. We have incorporated Barber's extensive, hand-written corrections, and rearranged the entries into rough derivational sets as described below. According to Barber's introduction:

"The dictionary here offered is a translation into English and a complete re-arrangement of R. van Eck's 'Eerste Proeve van een Balineesch-Hollandsch Woordenboek' (Utrecht, 1876), supplemented from other sources. These are:

(1) the enormous Kawi-Balinese-Dutch dictionary of H. van der Tuuk (ca 1900);

(2) the Kamus Bali Indonésia (Dénpasar, Bali,1978) undertaken by a committee of Balinese scholars, in which Drs Hi Wayan Warna seems to have played the major role;

(3) the English-Balinese-Indonesian Vocabulary (1977, Dénpasar) of the Revd. Pater N. Shadeg, S.V.D.,M.A., who also very kindly supplied me with additional information;

(4) two Balinese-speaking research-students at the University of Aberdeen: Dr I.G.M. Tantra and Mr N. Putra, B.A.,M.Sc., who both kindly and patiently endured many hours of questioning by one who knew very little about Bali and its language;

5) a number of small books in Balinese, including the 1926 edition of the Bible Society's translation of the gospel of St Luke."

Coincidentally, a new edition of this work (attributed to Rev. Shadeg) is now available from Tuttle Publishing. We are indebted to its editor, Prof. I Gusti Made Sutjaja (Udayana University), for his clarification of the text.

Extending Barber
Any given Balinese base form (e.g. a noun or verb) may have several types of derivative or alternative forms that may be difficult to find:

-- transitive and intransitive verb forms;

-- a reduplicated form;

-- a set of derived forms created by adding prefixes and suffixes;

-- forms of alternative social/usage register;

-- alternative forms due to phonological alteration or simplification.

While Barber makes a concerted effort to mark or refer to the base words that form heads or derivatives, he does not always create separate entries for them. Transitive forms, in particular, are not always listed as headwords. We have added entries for these, referring back to the original source ("transitive base, from ...").

In addition, Barber does not regularly gather all related forms under a single head, which can make it difficult to grasp the full picture of Balinese morphological and phonological variation. Insofar as possible, we have collected these so that any search can reveal the complete word family of related forms (his information is re-used in automatic lemmatization as well). Restriction of the display to the sought item, the item and its base form, and/or the full family is discussed below.

Display
Please note the alternatives for display on the left (try with "cerik"):

-- show self only shows the headword or derived form that matched.

-- show self/parent shows the lemma of the (derived) form as well.

-- show family shows the lemma and all derived forms.

Searching
As noted above, Balinese base forms may be heavily modified. Finding the base of a word that's not listed exactly -- a frequent problem for the student or reader -- may be challenging.

This search tool uses a variety of techniques to automatically find useful information, including a root-finder based on CSTlemma (Bart Jongejan). Searches may:

-- match a single character with ?, and zero or more with *. Thus, ca?ak matches cabak, cacak, cagak, etc., while ca*an matches cacakan, cangglak, and many others.

-- require matches for both, or either, Indonesian text (of the headword), or English text (in the definition).

-- be limited to a particular etymology, usage, type, or subject.

Predictive completion Dictionary heads will appear as you type. Short lists will include multi-word entries and examples (compare dad to dadi).

Lemmatization and "smart" search To help locate phrases and derivatives, search will automatically:

-- search examples for an instance of the word if it isn't found in a head (try gambil).

-- next, lemmatize the word, and search for the root (try dagelyang).

-- In case of a multi-word phrase, we automatically search examples, then search for the phrase as a list of separate words, then search for the list of roots.

The English search term can be expanded (default) to include inflected forms (a search for sing matches sings, singing, sang, sung as well). Approximate search for Balinese means that we ignore diacritics, glottal marks (the ' ), and hyphens in compounds.

Copyright notice
* Copyright 1979, Aberdeen University Library.