"Nothing," observes Mr. Taylor very truly, "nothing in the
Balkan Peninsula is so desirable as the laying aside of the feud." He
may take it that this feud has been aroused and maintained among the
_intelligentsia_ and for political reasons, with Macedonia in the
forefront. I think he would not be so severe on those who are
"ignorant apparently that the mutual animosity has its roots deep down
in the history and historical consciousness of Serb and Bulgar" if he
remembered that the Bulgars wanted Michael for their prince, and if he
had been present at the siege of Adrianople, where the Serbian and
Bulgarian soldiers, in their eagerness to fraternize, took to speaking
their respective languages incorrectly, the Serb dropping his cases
and the Bulgar his article, in the hope that they would thus make
themselves more easily understood. It seems to me not only more
advisable but more rational to ponder upon such incidents than upon
the idle controversies as to which army was the most deserving; and I
do not think it is evidence of any widespread Bulgarian animosity
because a certain official decided to charge the Serbian Government a
fee for conveying back to Serbia the corpses of their soldiers.
With regard to the two languages, the differences between them will
matter no more than does the difference between Serbo-Croatian and
Slovene. The Serb-Croat-Slovene State has been astonishingly little
incommoded by the fact that the Slovene language is quite distinct,
the two tongues being only in a moderate degree mutually intelligible.
The Slovenes have never been exposed to the influence either of
Byzantium or of the Turks, so that their language is free from the
orientalisms which abound in the southern dialects. But it is curious
to note[1] that many of the Slovene archaisms of form and structure,
such as the persistence of the "v" for "u" and the final -l of the
past participle, which have disappeared from Serbo-Croat, have been
preserved in the dialects of Macedonia. The Bulgarian language, the
south-eastern Serbian dialects, as well as Roumanian and Albanian,
have certain grammatical peculiarities, through being influenced by
the language of the Romanized Thraco-Illyrian peoples with whom they
merged. Even Montenegro was to some degree influenced by this process,
having lost one or two cases, such as the locative. In Serbia one uses
seven cases, the Montenegrin generally contents himself with about
five, and in some dialects they are all discarded.... The amount of
Turanian, Petcheneg and other undesirable blood in the Bulgars does
not--let the two or three eccentric Bulgars say what they
will--prevent them being far more Yugoslav than anything else.
Professor Cvijić, the famous Rector of Belgrade University, has
made personal examinations in Bulgaria, and is of the opinion that a
great part of that people, for instance, at Trnovo in the middle of
Bulgaria, is physically and spiritually very near to the Serbs. The
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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