Ancient Macedonian language
| Macedonian | |
|---|---|
| Region | Macedon |
| Era | 1st millennium BC |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
xmk |
| Glottolog | None |
Ancient Macedonian, the language of the ancient Macedonians, 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 the 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 the North Western Ancient Greek dialects.
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 (/bʰ, dʰ, gʰ/) sometimes appear as voiced stops /b, d, g/, (written β, δ, γ), whereas they are generally unvoiced as /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ (φ, θ, χ) elsewhere in Greek, barring a few exceptions.
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 Laconian Doric (the dialect of Sparta) γλεπ- glep- for common Greek βλεπ- blep-, as well as Doric γλάχων gláchōn and Ionic γλήχων glēchōn for common Greek βλήχων blēchōn.
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