Ancient Macedonian language

The Ancient Macedonian language (provisional ISO-DIS 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, during the 1st millennium BC, surviving into the early centuries of the Common Era. It is as yet undetermined whether the language was a separate yet sibling language which was most closely related to Greek, or a dialect of Greek, or an independent Indo-European language not especially close to Greek.

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, mainly from coin inscriptions, and from the 5th century lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, amounting to about 700 words and proper names. Most of these are confidently identifiable as Greek, but some of them are not easily reconciled with standard Greek phonology.

The

References

  • H. Ahrens De Graecae linguae dialectis, Goettingen, 1843.
  • Albrecht von Blumenthal, Hesychstudien, Stuttgart, 1930.
  • Edmonds, J.M. The Fragments of Attic Comedy, "Strattis, Passage 28". Leiden: Brill, 1957.
  • Fasmer, M. The Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language. Moscow, 1986.
  • S. Hornblower, A. Spawforth (Editors), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, revised 3rd ed., New York/London, Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • O. Hoffmann Die Makedonen. Ihre Sprache und ihr Volkstum, Goettingen 1906
  • Brian Joseph (1999), Ancient Greek in: J. Garry, C. Rubino, A. Faber, R. French (editors), Facts About the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages: Past and Present, New York/Dublin, H. W. Wilson Press, 2001
  • Katcic, Ancient Languages of the Balkans, The Hague, Mouton (1976).
  • J. P. Mallory, D. Q. Adams (edd.) Encyclopedia of Indo-European culture, 1997.
  • 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, t. XC, 1995, p. 231-239.
  • Neroznak, V. Paleo-Balkan languages, Moscow, 1978.
  • Pokorny, Julius, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Bern, 1959.

Further reading

  • G. Babiniotis Ancient Macedonian: The Place of Macedonian among the Greek Dialects in : A. M. Tamis (ed.), Macedonian Hellenism, Melbourne 1990, pp. 241-250
  • C. Brixhe, A. Panayotou, Le Macédonien in: Langues indo-européennes, ed. Bader, Paris, 1994, 205–220.
  • J. Chadwick The Prehistory of the Greek Language, Cambridge 1963

Links

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