The Ancient Macedonian language (ISO 639-3.5 XMK) was the tongue of the ancient Macedonians. It was spoken especially in the inland regions of Macedon, away from the coast where Greek was common, during the 1st millennium BC, surviving into the early centuries of the Common Era. The language was closely related to Greek (forming a Greco-Macedonian group) and scholars have also cited its possible relation to the Phrygian, Thracian or Illyrian languages. Julius Pokorny in his Indo-European dictionary classifies the Macedonian language with Phrygian ,despite the lack of information.

Our knowledge of the language is very limited because there are no surviving Macedonian texts, though a body of authentic Macedonian words has been assembled from ancient sources (in particular, about 700 mainly from the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria). There are a number of classical references that indicate that the Greeks viewed Macedonians as a rather separate ethnos, while other classical references indicate the opposite. Many scholars have taken these references (along with the distinct character of the known Macedonian words) to mean that the Greeks recognized a marked difference between Macedonian and Greek (all known dialects considered).

On the other hand, most of the ancient Macedonian words saved to us, including personal names, names of cities and other common words are clearly of Greek origin. There are no inscriptions in the area of ancient Macedon that are written in a separate language; all inscriptions found in the area are Greek ones. Among the classical references that may indicate that Macedonian was a Greek dialect, there is the dialogue between an Athenaean and a Macedonian presented in a comedy of the Athenaen poet Strattis of around 400 BC, where Macedonian is presented as a form of Greek.

Most linguists consider that the Macedonian tongue was a separate language, not a dialect of Greek, though related to Greek. A number of differences have been identified, most notably, the voiced aspirated consonants did not become voiceless but were preserved (ex: Macedonian ' danos' (death) from PIE *dhwene (to die), while Greek has ' thanatos').

The ancient Macedonian lexical stock reveals many words that do not have cognates in Greek, but do have in other Indo-European languages, including Thracian and Italic. There are also some words that do not have cognates in any other language, and may be of pre-Indo-European origin.

As southern Greek influence increased, Macedonians increasingly began to adopt the Attic dialect as their tongue, and over the centuries the native Macedonian language (or Greek dialect)fell out of favor and became relegated to the remote inland areas. Eventually, Greek supplanted it entirely, and the Macedonian language became extinct.

There is an opposing school of thought that maintains that Macedonian was a Greek dialect. A recent proponent of this school was the late Professor Olivier Masson, who in his article on the ancient Macedonian language in the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996) suggested that Macedonian was related to North-Western Greek dialects, though Masson admitted that this was a tentative unverified hypothesis. The view that Macedonian was a Greek dialect is less accepted among current linguists.

There is as yet no conclusive evidence of a Macedonian language separate from Greek, it is still a theory proposed by linguists.

See also

• Macedon
• Macedonians
• Pelasgians
• Paleo-Balkan languages

References

• Edmonds, J.M. The Fragments of Attic Comedy, "Strattis, Passage 28". Leiden: Brill,1957.
• Pokorny, Julius, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Bern, 1959.

External links

• The Old Macedonian language (The Indo-European Database)
• Linguist List classification
• A small sample of Macedonian words
• TIED Essay on Paleo-Balkan languages