daunting

from The Impossible Country by Brian Hall, a travelogue about the author's journey through Yugoslavia in the early '90s, just as it was falling apart:

I thought of the old adage that you could tell something about a nation by its vocabulary, Inuit having a dozen words for snow, Bedouin for sand, Meso-Americans for tubers, and so on. Serbo-Croatian had a disturbingly large number of words for butchering. One of them was kundaciti [with a v-shaped accent over the c, I don't know how to make the computer do that], which means "to beat with the butt end of a rifle."

and I'm supposed to go help make this culture less violent?