Ancient Macedonian language


Ancient Macedonian was the language or dialect spoken by the ancient Macedonians during the 1st millennium BC. It was either an ancient Greek dialect—part of Northwest or Aeolic Greek—or a Hellenic language that was distinct from but related to ancient Greek. Spoken originally in the kingdom of Macedon, it gradually fell out of use during the 4th century BC, marginalized by the Macedonian aristocracy's use of Attic Greek, the dialect that became the basis of Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Hellenistic period. It became extinct during either the Hellenistic or Roman imperial period, and was entirely replaced by Koine Greek.
While the bulk of surviving public and private inscriptions found in ancient Macedonia were written in Attic Greek, fragmentary documentation of a vernacular local Macedonian variety comes from onomastic evidence, ancient glossaries, and recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the curse tablets from Pella and Pydna.
File:Growth of the ancient Greek Kingdom of Macedon v2.svg|thumb|250px|Ancient Macedon up to the death of Philip II, showing the Upper and Lower divisions

Classification

Scholars have variously proposed that ancient Macedonian was a dialect of Greek, a sister language or an independent Indo-European language, and the disputes have sometimes had modern nationalistic overtones. Research has also considered the extent of influence from Thessalian Aeolic Greek and non-Greek substrata or adstrata, such as Phrygian, Illyrian, and Thracian. There has been some recent scholarly agreement, often expressed as cautious or tentative, that ancient Macedonian is a dialect of the Northwest Greek group. A minority of scholars, however, continues to view the language as a separate Indo-European language related to Greek. Suggested classifications include:
Among those who support that ancient Macedonian was a Greek dialect, Angelos Boufalis suggests that "several features can be established as local and most of them seem indeed to be shared with the NW Doric and/or the Thessalian dialect", and also that "rather than a monolithic dialect throughout, different local or regional idioms may have had been spoken in this extensive geographical area". Sowa suggests that "it seems also possible that the inhabitants of the Lower Macedonia spoke an Aeolic dialect, and those from Upper Macedonia a north-western Greek dialect". Hammond suggests that in the region of Upper Macedonia, the tribes of Elimiotes, Orestes, Lyncestae, and Pelagones, were all Epirotic tribes speaking the Northwest Greek dialect.

Properties

Because of the fragmentary sources of Ancient Macedonian, only a little is understood about the special features of the language. A notable sound-law is that the voiced aspirates of Proto-Indo-European sometimes appear as voiced stops /b, d, g/,, whereas they were generally unvoiced as /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ elsewhere in most Greek.
  • Macedonian δάνος dánοs, compared to Attic θάνατος
  • Macedonian ἀβροῦτες abroûtes or ἀβροῦϝες abroûwes, compared to Attic ὀφρῦς for 'eyebrows'
  • Macedonian Βερενίκη Bereníkē, compared to Attic Φερενίκη, 'bearing victory'
  • Macedonian ἄδραια adraia, compared to Attic αἰθρία, from PIE *h₂aidh-
  • Macedonian βάσκιοι báskioi, compared to Attic φάσκωλος 'leather sack', from PIE *bhasko
  • According to Herodotus 7.73, the Macedonians claimed that the Phryges were called Bryges before they migrated from Thrace to Anatolia.
  • According to Plutarch, Moralia Macedonians use 'b' instead of 'ph', while Delphians use 'b' in the place of 'p'.
  • Macedonian μάγειρος mágeiros was a loan from Doric into Attic. Vittore Pisani has suggested an ultimately Macedonian origin for the word, which could then be cognate to μάχαιρα
Macedonian shared with Thessalian, Elean, and Epirote, an "oddity" of cases where voiced stops appear to correspond to Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates,. In most Greek, the Proto-Indo-European aspirates were devoiced to voiceless aspirates, written . As with Macedonian, this phenomenon is sometimes attributed to non-Greek substrate and adstrate influence, with some linguists attributing such an influence on Epirote to Illyrian. Filos, however, notes, that the attribution of, and for specifically voiced stops is not secure. Simon Hornblower writes: "Little is known about how Macedonian Greek was spoken, except that for instance 'Philip' was pronounced 'Bilip'."
If γοτάν gotán is related to the Proto-Hellenic noun, and hence to the PIE noun , this would indicate that the labiovelars were either intact, or merged with the velars, unlike the usual Greek treatment. Such deviations, however, are not unknown in Greek dialects; compare Laconian Doric γλεπ- for common Greek βλεπ-, as well as Doric γλάχων and Ionic γλήχων for common Greek βλήχων.
A number of examples suggest that voiced velar stops were devoiced, especially word-initially: κάναδοι kánadoi, 'jaws' ; κόμβους, 'molars' ; within words: ἀρκόν arkón ; the Macedonian toponym, from the Pierian name Akesamenos.
In Aristophanes' The Birds, the form κεβλήπυρις is found, showing a Macedonian-style voiced stop in place of a standard Greek unvoiced aspirate: κεβλή versus κεφαλή .
A number of the Macedonian words, particularly in Hesychius of Alexandria's lexicon, are disputed and some may have been corrupted in the transmission. Thus abroutes may be read as , with tau replacing a digamma. If so, this word would perhaps be encompassable within a Greek dialect; however, others see the dental as authentic and think that this specific word would perhaps belong to an Indo-European language different from Greek.
Emilio Crespo, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid, concludes that: "the inscriptions from Aigeai, the ancient capital of the Macedonian kingdom, and from the other regions that formed the core of the ancient Temenid kingdom show occasional instances... in which appear instead of or of, respectively", while "similar examples are also attested in northern Thessaly". Emilio Crespo wrote that "the voicing of voiceless stops and the development of aspirates into voiced fricatives turns out to be the outcome of an internal development of Macedonian as a dialect of Greek", without excluding "the presence of interference from other languages or of any linguistic substrate or adstrate", as also argued by M. Hatzopoulos.
Hatzopoulos supports the hypothesis of a 'Achaean' substratum extending as far north as the head of the Thermaic Gulf, which had a continuous relation, in prehistoric times, both in Thessaly and Macedonia, with the Northwest Greek-speaking populations living on the other side of the Pindus mountain range, and contacts became cohabitation when the Argead Macedonians completed their wandering from Orestis to Lower Macedonia in the 7th c. BC. According to this hypothesis, Hatzopoulos concludes that the Ancient Macedonian dialect of the historical period, attested in inscriptions such as Pella curse tablet, is a sort of koine resulting from the interaction and the influences of various elements, the most important of which are the North-Achaean substratum, the Northwest Greek dialect of the Argead Macedonians, and the Thracian and Phrygian adstrata. Claude Brixhe espoused the hypothesis "of a sporadic secondary voicing of unvoiced consonants within the history of Greek", in agreement with Hatzopoulos.
A. Panayotou summarizes some features generally identified through ancient texts and epigraphy:

Phonology

  • Occasional development of voiced aspirates into voiced stops
  • Retention of */aː/, also present in Epirotic
  • as a result of contraction between and
  • Apocope of short vowels in prepositions in synthesis
  • Syncope and diphthongization are used to avoid hiatus.
  • Occasional retention of the pronunciation of /u/ in local cult epithets or nicknames
  • Raising of /ɔː/ to /uː/ in proximity to nasal
  • Simplification of the sequence /ign/ to /iːn/
  • Loss of aspiration of the consonant cluster /sth/

    Morphology

Ancient Macedonian morphology is shared with ancient Epirus, including some of the oldest inscriptions from Dodona. The morphology of the first declension nouns with an -ας ending is also shared with Thessalian.
  • First-declension masculine and feminine in -ας and -α respectively
  • First-declension masculine genitive singular in -α
  • First-declension genitive plural in -ᾶν
  • First person personal pronoun dative singular ἐμίν
  • Temporal conjunction ὁπόκα
  • Possibly, a non-sigmatic nominative masculine singular in the first declension

    Onomastics

Anthroponymy

M. Hatzopoulos and Johannes Engels summarize the Macedonian anthroponymy as follows:
  • Epichoric Greek names that either differ from the phonology of the introduced Attic or that remained almost confined to Macedonians throughout antiquity
  • Panhellenic Greek names
  • Identifiable non-Greek names
  • Names without a clear Greek etymology that can't however be ascribed to any identifiable non-Greek linguistic group.
Common in the creation of ethnics is the use of -έστης, -εστός especially when derived from sigmatic nouns.
Per Engels, the above material supports that Macedonian anthroponymy was predominantly Greek in character.