11 DECEMBER 1999, Page 42

From Mr Geoffrey Locke Sir: Noel Malcolm undermines his own

credibility by posing as a Serbo-Croat lin- guist. If he were, he would know that `Kacaniku' is merely the normal dative or locative case inflection of the Serbian place-name `Kacanik' (a noun). For him to describe it as the `definite form' of the word is ridiculous, since nouns in that language do not have definite or indefinite forms only the adjectives do.

Geoffrey Locke 21 Spencer Road, Canford Cliffs, Poole, Dorset