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-Albanianaffairs have appeared in the FortnightlyReview and, expanded from there, in a volumeentitled A Difficult Frontier.

NAMES AND PRONUNCIATION[7]

The original Serbo-Croat names of the Dalmatiantowns and islands have been commonly supplanted onthe German-made maps by later Italian names. Butas the older ones are those which are at present used indaily speech by the vast majority of the inhabitants, weshall not be accused of pedanticism or of political biasif we prefer them to the later versions. We thereforein this book do not speak of Fiume but of Rieka, not ofCattaro but of Kotor, and so forth. In other parts agreater laxity is permissible, since no false impression isconveyed by using the non-Slav version. Thus we havepreferred the more habitual Belgrade to the more correctBeograd, and the Italian Scutari to the Albanian Shqodra.The Yugoslavs themselves are too deferential towardsthe foreign nomenclature of their towns. Thus if one ofthem is talking to you of Novi Sad he will almost invariablyadd, until it grows rather wearisome, the Germanand the Magyar forms: Neu Satz and Uj Videk.

These names and those of persons have been generallyspelt in accordance with Croat orthography—that is tosay, with the Latin alphabet modified in order to reproduceall the sounds of the Serbo-Croatian language.This script, with its diacritic marks, was scientificallyevolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thechief points about it that we have to remember are thatc is pronounced as if written ts, ć as if written tch, č ispronounced ch, š is pronounced sh, and j is pronouncedy. So the Montenegrin towns Cetinje, Podgorica and[8]Nikšić are pronounced as if written Tsetinye, Podgoritsaand Nikshitch, while Pančevo 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 ofYugoslavia, since that has come to be the more familiarform.

The full list of Croat letters, in so far as they differfrom the English alphabet, is as follows: