Ancient Macedonian language


Ancient Macedonian, the language of the ancient Macedonians, either a dialect of Ancient Greek, or a separate Hellenic language, was spoken in the kingdom of Macedonia during the 1st millennium BC and belongs to the Indo-European language family. It gradually fell out of use during the 4th century BC, marginalized by the use of Attic Greek by the Macedonian aristocracy, the Ancient Greek dialect that became the basis of Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Hellenistic period.
The surviving public and private inscriptions found in Macedonia indicate that there was no other written language in ancient Macedonia but Ancient Greek, and recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the Pella curse tablet, suggest that ancient Macedonian might have been a variety of North Western Ancient Greek. Other linguistic evidence suggests that although Ancient Greek was the language of literacy, the vernacular was a separate language, although closely related.

Classification

Due to the fragmentary attestation of this language or dialect, various interpretations are possible.
Suggested phylogenetic classifications of Macedonian include:
From the few idiomatic words that survive, only a little can be said about special features of the language. A notable sound-law is that the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates sometimes appear as voiced stops /b, d, g/,, whereas they are generally unvoiced as /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ elsewhere in Greek.
If γοτάν gotán is related to *gwou, 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- glep- for common Greek βλεπ- blep-, as well as Doric γλάχων gláchōn and Ionic γλήχων glēchōn for common Greek βλήχων blēchōn.
A number of examples suggest that voiced velar stops were devoiced, especially word-initially: κάναδοι kánadoi, 'jaws' ; κόμβους kómbous, 'molars' ; within words: ἀρκόν arkón ; the Macedonian toponym Akesamenai, from the Pierian name Akesamenos.
In Aristophanes' The Birds, the form κεβλήπυρις keblēpyris is found, showing a Macedonian-style voiced stop in place of a standard Greek unvoiced aspirate: κεβλή keblē versus κεφαλή kephalē.
A number of the Macedonian words, particularly in Hesychius of Alexandria' lexicon, are disputed and some may have been corrupted in the transmission. Thus abroutes, may be read as abrouwes, 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.
A. Panayotou summarizes some features generally identified through ancient texts and epigraphy:

Phonology

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.

Anthroponymy

M. Hatzopoulos summarizes the Macedonian anthroponymy as follows:
Common in the creation of ethnics is the use of -έστης, -εστός especially when derived from sigmatic nouns.

Toponymy

The toponyms of Macedonia proper are generally Greek, though some of them show a particular phonology and a few others are non-Greek.

Calendar

The Macedonian names of about half or more of the months of the ancient Macedonian calendar have a clear and generally accepted Greek etymology, though some of the remaining ones have sometimes been considered to be Greek but showing a particular Macedonian phonology.

Epigraphy

Macedonian onomastics: the earliest epigraphical documents attesting substantial numbers of Macedonian proper names are the second Athenian alliance decree with Perdiccas II, the decree of Kalindoia and seven curse tablets of the 4th century BC bearing mostly names.


About 99% of the roughly 6,300 Macedonian-period inscriptions discovered by archaeologists were written in the Greek language, using the Greek alphabet. The Pella curse tablet, a text written in a distinct Doric Greek dialect, found in 1986 and 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 dialect group.

Hesychius Glossary

A body of idiomatic 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, though the number of considered words sometimes differs from scholar to scholar. The majority of these words can be confidently assigned to Greek albeit some words would appear to reflect a dialectal form of Greek. There are, however, a number of words that are not easily identifiable as Greek and reveal, for example, voiced stops where Greek shows voiceless aspirates. Specific words and consonant shifts are, however, present in most dialects of most languages.
marked words which have been corrupted.
A number of Hesychius words are listed orphan; some of them have been proposed as Macedonian
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, where a stranger is portrayed as speaking in a rural Greek dialect. His language contains expressions such as ὕμμες ὡττικοί for ὑμεὶς ἀττικοί "you Athenians", ὕμμες being also attested in Homer, Sappho and Theocritus, while ὡττικοί appears only in "funny country bumpkin" contexts of Attic comedy.
Another text that has been quoted as evidence is a passage from Livy in his Ab urbe condita. Describing political negotiations between Macedonians and Aetolians in the late 3rd century BC, Livy has a Macedonian ambassador argue that Aetolians, Acarnanians and Macedonians were "men of the same language". This has been interpreted as referring to a shared North-West Greek speech. In another passage, Livy states that an announcement was translated from Latin to Greek for Macedonians to understand.
Quintus Curtius Rufus, Philotas's trial and the statement that the Greek-speaking Branchidae had common language with the Macedonians.
Over time, "Macedonian", when referring to language acquired the meaning of Koine Greek.

Contributions to the Koine

As a consequence of the Macedonians' role in the formation of the Koine, Macedonian contributed considerable elements, unsurprisingly including some military terminology. Among the many contributions were the general use of the first declension grammar for male and female nouns with an -as ending, attested in the genitive of Macedonian coinage from the early 4th century BC of Amyntas III. There were changes in verb conjugation such as in the Imperative δέξα attested in Macedonian sling stones found in Asiatic battlefields, that became adopted in place of the Attic forms. Koine Greek established a spirantisation of beta, gamma and delta, which has been attributed to the Macedonian influence. Other adoptions from the ancient Macedonian include the simplification of the sequence /ign/ to /i:n/ and the loss of aspiration of the consonant cluster /sth/ , for example as in a Koine inscription from Dura-Europos from the 2nd or 3rd century AD: "τον Χριστὀν μνἠσκεστε".