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This article is about the language used in antiquity. For the unrelated Slavic language, see Macedonian language.
| Ancient Macedonian | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Macedon (extinct language) | |
| Language extinction: | absorbed by Attic Greek in the 4th century BC | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Centum, possibly Greek Ancient Macedonian | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | ine | |
| ISO 639-3: | xmk | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Ancient Macedonian language was the language of the Ancient Macedonians. It was spoken in Macedon during the 1st millennium BC. Marginalized from the 5th century BC, it was gradually replaced by the common Greek dialect of the Hellenistic Era. It was probably spoken predominantly in the inland regions away from the coast. Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language closely related to Greek, but its exact relationship is unclear: possibly a dialect of Greek; a sibling language to Greek; or a close cousin to Greek, and perhaps related to some extent, to Thracian and Phrygian languages.
Knowledge of the language is very limited because there are no surviving texts that are indisputably written in the language, though a body of authentic Macedonian words has been assembled from ancient sources, mainly from coin inscriptions, and from the 5th century lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, amounting to about 150 words and 200 proper names, similar to standard Greek, but a small minority might not easily reconciled with standard Greek phonology.
The Pella curse tablet, a text written in a distinct Doric Greek idiom, found in 1986, dated to between mid to early 4th century BC, has been forwarded as an argument that the ancient Macedonian language was a dialect of North-Western Greek, part of the Doric dialects (O. Masson, 1996). Before the discovery it was proposed that the Macedonian dialect was an early form of Greek, spoken alongside Doric proper at that time (Rhomiopoulou, 1980).
The Pella curse tablet (Greek katadesmos): from Prof. Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Bryn Mawr College
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From the few words that survive, only a little can be said about the language. A notable sound-law is that the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates (/bʰ, dʰ, gʰ/) appear as voiced stops /b, d, g/, (written β, δ, γ), in contrast to all known Greek dialects, which have unvoiced them to /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ (φ, θ, χ) with few exceptionsExceptions to the rule:
The same treatment is known from other Paleo-Balkan languages, e.g. Phrygian brater, Illyrian (and Elean, North-West dialect, by exception) braReported as Elean and later proposed as Illyrian. but Attic phrater and phratra all from PIE *bhrater- brother. Since these languages are all known via the Greek alphabet, which has no signs for voiced aspirates, it is unclear whether de-aspiration had really taken place, or whether β, δ, γ were just picked as the closest matches to express voiced aspirates.
If γοτάν gotán (\'pig\') is related to *gwou (\'cattle\'), this would indicate that the labiovelars were either intact, or merged with the velars, unlike the usual Greek treatment (Attic βοῦς boûs). Such deviations, however, are not unknown in Greek dialects; compare Doric (Spartan) γλεπ- glep- for common Greek βλεπ- blep-, as well as Doric γλάχων gláchōn and Ionic γλήχων glēchōn for common Greek βλήχων blēchōn.Albrecht von Blumenthal, Hesychstudien, Stuttgart, 1930, 21.
A number of examples suggest that voiced velar stops were devoiced, especially word-initially: κάναδοι kánadoi, \'jaws\' (
In Aristophanes\' The Birds, the form κεβλήπυρις keblēpyris (\'red-cap bird\') is found, showing a Macedonian-style voiced stop in place of a standard Greek unvoiced aspirate: κεβ(α)λή keb(a)lē versus κεφαλή kephalē (\'head\').
Due to the fragmentary attestation various interpretations are possible.B. Joseph (2001): "Ancient Greek". In: J. Garry et al. (eds.) Facts about the world\'s major languages: an encyclopedia of the world\'s major languages, past and present. Online paper The discussion is closely related to the reconstruction of the Proto-Greek language. The suggested historical interpretations of Macedonian include: Mallory, J.P. (1997). in Mallory, J.P. and Adams, D.Q. (eds.): Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Chicago-London: Fitzroy Dearborn, p. 361. ISBN 1-884964-98-2.
Meillet and other Indo-Europeanists consider Macedonian an Indo-European language in its own right, close to Greek but perhaps not of unambiguously Greek stock, and treat it as other, so-called "Paleo-Balkans languages"[citation needed] which might also include Thracian, Phrygian and/or other poorly attested languages[citation needed] of some geographical proximity. Those who look towards "Thraco-Phrygian" (as I. I. Russu, 1938) do so sometimes, at the cost of unwarranted segmentations such as that of Ἀλέξανδρος into †Ἀλε- and †ξανδ-. The name is attested as early as the Mycenaean Greek period (c. 1600 -1100 BC) next to the feminine a-re-ka-sa-da-ra (Greek Ἀλεξάνδρα). Schwyzer Griechische Grammatik, Munich 1939, vol. 1, 69-71. and others hypothesize that linguistically Macedonian was between Illyrian and Thracian, a kind of intermediary language linking the two, in the sense of a dialect continuum or Sprachbund, since a genetic Thraco-Illyrian unity is highly uncertain and cannot be proven on grounds of the surviving evidence. In 1999, A. Garrett has surmised that Macedonian may at an early stage have been part of a dialect continuum which spanned the ancestor dialects of all south-western Indo-European languages (including Greek), but that it then remained peripheral to later areal processes of convergence which produced Greek proper. He argues that under this perspective sound-change isoglosses such as the deaspiration of voiced stops may be of limited diagnostic value, while ultimately the question of whether Macedonian belongs or does not belong to a genetic union with Greek is moot.Andrew Garrett (1999): "A new model of Indo-European subgrouping and dispersal". In: Chang, S. S, Liaw, L. and Ruppenhofer, J, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 12-15, Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 146-56, 1999. Online paper (PDF)
Vladimir I. GeorgievGeorgiev, Vladimir (1981), Introduction to the history of the Indo-European languages. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Cited in Blažek, Václav (2007) "From August Schleicher to Sergei Starostin. On the development of the tree-diagram models of the Indo-European languages", Journal of Indo-European Studies 35: 82-109 places Greek and Macedonian on a common branch of an IE family tree; this branch he groups together with Phrygian and Armenian to form a grouping termed "Central" Indo-European. Similarly, Eric P. Hamp Hamp, Eric P. (1990) "The Pre-Indo-European Language of Northern (Central) Europe". In: When Worlds Collide: The Indo-Europeans and the Pre-Indo-Europeans, eds. T.L. Markey & J.A.C. Greppin. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 291-309. Cited in Blažek, op.cit. assumes a common branch of Greek plus Macedonian, with the next larger unit formed together with Armenian and termed "Pontic South Indo-European".
Some linguists have proposed calling the common Greek-Macedonian group together "Hellenic". Thus, HuldHuld, Martin (1995). "Grassmann\'s law in Messapic." Journal of Indo-European Studies 23: 147-155. Cited in Blažek, op.cit. groups together Greek, Macedonian, Phrygian and perhaps also Messapic under this term. A "Hellenic" group comprising Greek and Macedonian is also suggested as a possibility by Brian Joseph and has been adopted in the classification scheme used by the LINGUIST List. The Linguist List is classifying ancient Macedonian with Greek (all known ancient and modern dialects) under a Hellenic supertree.
A number of the Macedonian words, particularly in Hesychius\' lexicon, are disputed (i.e., some do not consider them actual Macedonian words) and some may have been corrupted in the transmission. Thus abroutes, may be read as abrouwes (αβρουϝες), with tau (Τ) replacing a digamma (F).Olivier Masson, "Sur la notation occasionnelle du digamma grec par d\'autres consonnes et la glose macédonienne abroutes", Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris, 90 (1995) 231-239. If so, this word would perhaps be encompassable within a Greek dialect; however, others (e.g. A. Meillet) see the dental as authentic and think that this specific word would perhaps belong to an Indo-European language different from Greek.
Another school of thought favours Macedonian as an explicitly Greek dialect. Those who favour a purely Greek nature of Macedonian as a northern Greek dialect are numerous and include early scholars like H. Ahrens, O. Hoffmann or A. Fick. H. Ahrens, De Graecae linguae dialectis, Göttingen, 1843; O. Hoffmann, Die Makedonen. Ihre Sprache und ihr Volkstum, Göttingen 1906. A recent proponent of this school was Professor Olivier Masson, who in his article on the ancient Macedonian language in the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary tentatively suggested that Macedonian was related to North-Western Greek dialects:
| “ | In our view the Greek character of most names is obvious and it is difficult to think of a Hellenization due to wholesale borrowing [...]The small minority of names which do not look Greek [...] may be due to a substratum or adstratum influences (as elsewhere in Greece).Macedonian may then be seen as a Greek dialect, characterized by its marginal position and by local pronunciations. Yet in contrast with earlier views which made of it an Aeolic dialect [...] we must by now think of a link with North-West Greek [...] We must wait for new discoveries, but we may tentatively conclude that Macedonian is a dialect related to North-West Greek. | ” |
As to Macedonian β, δ, γ = Greek φ, θ, χ, Claude BrixheClaude Brixhe, "Un «nouveau» champ de la dialectologie grecque: le macédonien", in: A. C. Cassio (ed.), Katà diálekton. Atti del III Colloquio Internazionale di Dialettologia Greca (A.I.O.N., XIX), Napoli 1996, 35-71. suggests that it may have been a later development: The letters may already have designated not voiced stops, i.e. [b, d, g], but voiced fricatives, i.e. [β, δ, γ], due to a voicing of the voiceless fricatives [φ, θ, x] (= Classical Attic [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ]). Brian Joseph sums up that "[t]he slender evidence is open to different interpretations, so that no definitive answer is really possible", but cautions that "most likely, Ancient Macedonian was not simply an Ancient Greek dialect on a par with Attic or Aeolic". In this sense, some authors also call it a "deviant Greek dialect."
Among the references that have been discussed as possibly bearing some witness to the linguistic situation in Macedonia, there is a sentence from a fragmentary dialogue, apparently between an Athenian and a Macedonian, in an extant fragment of the 5th century BC comedy \'Macedonians\' by the Athenian poet Strattis (fr. 28), where a stranger is portrayed as speaking in a rural Greek dialect. His language contains expressions such as ὕμμες ὡττικοί for ὑμείς αττικοί "you Athenians", ὕμμες being also attested in Homer, Sappho (Lesbian) and Theocritus (Doric), while ὡττικοί appears only in "funny country bumpkin" contexts of Attic comedy.Steven Colvin, Dialect in Aristophanes and the politics of language in Ancient Greek, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 279.
Another text that has been quoted as evidence is a passage from Livy (lived 59 BC-14 AD) in his Ab urbe condita (31.29). Describing political negotiations between Macedonians and Aetolians in the late 3rd century BC, Livy has a Macedonian ambassador argue that Aetolians and Macedonians were "men of the same language".Livy 31.29.15 (in Latin). This has been interpreted as referring to their common North-West Greek speech (as opposed to Attic Koiné).A. Panayotou: The position of the Macedonian dialect. In: Maria Arapopoulou, Maria Chritē, Anastasios-Phoivos Christides (eds.), A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007. 433-458 (Google Books).
Quintus Curtius Rufus, Philotas\'s trialE. Kapetanopoulos, "Alexander’s patrius sermo in the Philotas affair", The ancient world 30 (1999) 117-128. PdforHtm.
As southern Greek influence increased, Macedonians increasingly began to adopt the Attic dialect first as an official, and then as a vernacular in its koine form. It is estimated that ancient Macedonian became supplanted by the 4th century BC.In the Shadow of Olympus: The Emergence of Macedon - Eugene N. Borza (citing Hammond)
James L. O\'Neil\'s (University of Sydney) pointed out : Beside Pella curse tablet three other, very brief, 4th century inscriptions are also indubitably Doric. These show that a Doric dialect was spoken in Macedon, as we would expect from the West Greek forms of Greek names found in Macedon. And yet later Macedonian inscriptions are in Koine avoiding both Doric forms and the Macedonian voicing of consonants. The native Macedonian dialect had become unsuitable for written documents (Pella curse tablet#Dating and significance)
The below list includes only those regions and elements that may be related or have been written by Macedonians before 350 BC.Early evidence from coastal cities dates back to 600-550 BC in Central Macedonia (Sane[4],Therme[5]) ~ 550 BC East Macedonia (Neapolis)[6] and 5th c.BC West side(Pydna)[7].There is also a Carian inscription found in Therme 6th c. BC[8].
Egypt:155 Northern Greece:5 Syria: 1.
Glossary
III.106e-V (3 inscriptions, all related to late Ptolemies)Delos[20]-Cyprus [21]-Alexandria[22]
The phrase of Athenaeus (3.122.a) makedonizontas t\' oida pollous tôn Attikôn dia tên epimixian (I am also aware of many Attic authors using Macedonian because of the admixture) may refer to Macedonian vocabularyAthenaeus.The Learned Banqueters [37] by S Douglas Olson or rather speaking in forms of KoineA History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity2.c.Various words of Attic changed their meaning in Hellenistic period;some of them due to Macedonian influenceRemarks on the Synonyms of the New Testament[38] by Johann August Heinrich Tittmann.
The below words of unknown date, out of the single Hesychius manuscript, are marked as Macedonian.For the words of Macedonian Amerias, see Glossary of Amerias.Terms that occur in epigraphy are transferred above.
