Both sides have also appealed to other arguments to prove that all Slavic Macedonia ought to belong to them. Endless controversy has raged over the question whether its people speak Bulgarian or Serbian. It has been triumphantly demonstrated, on the one hand, that the Macedonians are Bulgars because they use a definite article and do not inflect their nouns; but it has also been conclusively shown that they are Serbs by all the laws of morphology and phonetics. In fact, the best philological judgment seems to be that these people speak a series of dialects intermediate between Bulgarian and Serbian, gradually shading off from one into the other; and that they can without much difficulty understand either language. Equally inconclusive are the arguments based on popular customs. Although it has been attempted, one will never solve the Macedonian question by proving that marriage, burial, and saint’s day customs in this region are strikingly Serbian, or that the female costumes and the embroidery worn by the ladies are unmistakably Bulgarian. In customs as in language, this is simply a transitional area with affinities with both its neighbors. It is therefore a rather tragic thing that for a generation or two the public in Bulgaria has been trained to think that Macedonia is a fundamentally Bulgarian country pining for liberation. The feeling on that subject has been all the more intense because this was almost the only region that could be considered as unredeemed Bulgaria. Bulgarian patriotism could concentrate and specialize on Macedonia. Serbian feeling about the country was formerly not quite so strong, perhaps, since Serbia had so many other unredeemed kinsmen to ponder over--in Bosnia first and foremost. At any rate, since the events of the last seven years, after they have fought three wars for the possession of Macedonia, the Serbs now entertain feelings about that country that are not a bit less ardent and intransigent than those of the Bulgarians.