Ancient Macedonian was the language of the ancient Macedonians which was either a dialect of Ancient Greek or a separate Hellenic language. It was spoken in the kingdom of Macedonia during the 1st millennium BC and belonged 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. 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 (and later in Koine Greek), fragmentary documentation of a vernacular local variety comes from onomastic evidence, ancient glossaries and recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the Pella curse tablet. This local variety is usually classified by scholars as a dialect of Northwest Doric Greek, and occasionally as an Aeolic Greek dialect or a distinct sister language of Greek.
Classification
Due to the fragmentary attestation of this dialect or language, various interpretations are possible. Suggested classifications of ancient Macedonian include:
A Greek dialect, part of the Northwest Doric group of dialects; pioneered by (1808), and subsequently supported by Olivier Masson (1996), Michael Meier-Brügger (2003), Johannes Engels (2010), J. Méndez Dosuna (2012), Georgios Babiniotis (2014), Joachim Matzinger (2016), Emilio Crespo (2017), Claude Brixhe (2018), and M. B. Hatzopoulos (2020).
A Greek dialect related to, or a version of, Aeolic Greek; suggested by August Fick (1874), Otto Hoffmann (1906), N. G. L. Hammond (1997) and Ian Worthington (2012).
A sister language of Greek, according to a scheme in which Macedonian and Greek are the two branches of a Greco-Macedonian subgroup (sometimes called "Hellenic"); suggested by Georgiev (1966), Joseph (2001) and Hamp (2013).
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 Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates (/bʰ, dʰ, gʰ/) sometimes appear as voiced stops /b, d, g/, (written ), whereas they were generally unvoiced as /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ () elsewhere in Ancient Greek. Macedonian dánοs ('death', from PIE 'to leave'), compared to Attic Macedonian abroûtes or abroûwes, compared to Attic for 'eyebrows' Macedonian Bereníkē, compared to Attic , 'bearing victory' (Personal name) Macedonian adraia ('bright weather'), compared to Attic , from PIE Macedonian báskioi ('fasces'), compared to Attic 'leather sack', from PIE According to Herodotus 7.73 (c. 440 BC), the Macedonians claimed that the Phryges were called Bryges before they migrated from Thrace to Anatolia (around 8th–7th century BC). According to Plutarch, Moralia Macedonians use 'b' instead of 'ph', while Delphians use 'b' in the place of 'p'. Macedonian mágeiros ('butcher') was a loan from Doric into Attic. Vittore Pisani has suggested an ultimately Macedonian origin for the word, which could then be cognate to ('knife', < PIE , 'to fight')
If 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 ). Such deviations, however, are not unknown in Greek dialects; compare Laconian Doric (the dialect of Sparta) for common Greek , as well as Doric and Ionic for common Greek .
A number of examples suggest that voiced velar stops were devoiced, especially word-initially: kánadoi, 'jaws' (< PIE ); , 'molars' (< PIE ); within words: arkón (Attic ); the Macedonian toponym , from the Pierian name Akesamenos (if Akesa- is cognate to Greek , , "to astonish"; cf. the Thracian name ).
In Aristophanes' The Birds, the form ('red head', the name of a bird, perhaps the goldfinch or redpoll) is found, showing a Macedonian-style voiced stop in place of a standard Greek unvoiced aspirate: versus ('head'). 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.