The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1

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Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1, by Henry Baerlein

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Title: The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1
Author: Henry Baerlein
Release Date: August 26, 2007 [EBook #22414]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE LEGEND FOR NON-LATIN-1 CHARACTERS
['c], ['C] c with acute [vc], [vC] c with caron [vs], [vS] s with caron [vz], [vZ] z with caron d[vz], D[vz] d and z with caron

THE BIRTH OF YUGOSLAVIA
BY
HENRY BAERLEIN
VOLUME I
LONDON LEONARD PARSONS DEVONSHIRE STREET
First Published 1922 [All Rights Reserved]
LEONARD PARSONS LTD.
Portions of this book which deal with Yugoslav-Albanian affairs have appeared in the Fortnightly Review and, expanded from there, in a volume entitled A Difficult Frontier.

NAMES AND PRONUNCIATION
The original Serbo-Croat names of the Dalmatian towns and islands have been commonly supplanted on the German-made maps by later Italian names. But as the older ones are those which are at present used in daily speech by the vast majority of the inhabitants, we shall not be accused of pedanticism or of political bias if we prefer them to the later versions. We therefore in this book do not speak of Fiume but of Rieka, not of Cattaro but of Kotor, and so forth. In other parts a greater laxity is permissible, since no false impression is conveyed by using the non-Slav version. Thus we have preferred the more habitual Belgrade to the more correct Beograd, and the Italian Scutari to the Albanian Shqodra. The Yugoslavs themselves are too deferential towards the foreign nomenclature of their towns. Thus if one of them is talking to you of Novi Sad he will almost invariably add, until it grows rather wearisome, the German and the Magyar forms: Neu Satz and Uj Videk.
These names and those of persons have been generally spelt in accordance with Croat orthography--that is to say, with the Latin alphabet modified in order to reproduce all the sounds of the Serbo-Croatian language. This script, with its diacritic marks, was scientifically evolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The chief points about it that we have to remember are that c is pronounced as if written ts, ['c] as if written tch, [vc] is pronounced ch, [vs] is pronounced sh, and j is pronounced y. So the Montenegrin towns Cetinje, Podgorica and Nik[vs]i['c] are pronounced as if written Tsetinye, Podgoritsa and Nikshitch, while Pan[vc]evo is pronounced Panchevo. It will be seen that this matter is not very complicated. But we have not in every case employed the Croat script. We have not spoken in this book of Jugoslavia but of Yugoslavia, since that has come to be the more familiar form.
The full list of Croat letters, in so far as they differ from the English alphabet, is as follows:
c, whose English value is ts. ['c], " " " tch. [vc], " " " ch, as in church. [vs], " " " sh. [vz], " " " s, as in measure. d[vz], " " " j, as in James. gj (or dj), " " " j, " " j, " " " y, as in you. lj, " " " li, as in million. nj, " " " ni, as in opinion.

PREFACE
On a mild February afternoon I was waiting for the train at a wayside station in north-western Banat. So unimportant was that station that it was connected neither by telegraph nor telephone with any other station, and thus there was no means of knowing how long I would have to wait. The movements of the train in those parts could never, so I gathered, be foretold, and on that afternoon it was uncertain whether a strike had prevented it from leaving New-Arad, the starting-point. Occasionally the rather elegant stationmaster, and occasionally the porter with the round, disarming face, raised their voices in prophecy, but they were increasingly unable--so far, at least, as I was concerned--to modify the feelings of dullness that were caused by the circumstances and by the dreary nature of the surroundings: a plain with several uninteresting little lakes upon it. There was time enough for meditation--I was wondering if I would ever understand the people of the Balkans. One hour and then another slipped away, and the lakes began to be illuminated by the setting