Re: OT: Ancient Macedonian

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> The ancient-history site Livius.org has some stuff on the language of ancient
> Macedon at http://www.livius.org/maa-mam/macedonia/macedonia.html#Language ,
> which I found interesting enough to look for further material, preferably from
> professional linguists. However, as one may guess, the modern conflict between
> Greece and Macedonia (FYROM) has resulted in alot of partisan nonsense about
> the issue on the 'Net*.
Yes, indeed it has. A site which claimed ancient Macedonian was Greek,
period, is to be ignored - even more to be avoided is any site claiming
ancient Macedonian was a (southern) Slavonic language.

The Greeks of old regarded the Macedonians as more 'barbaroi' than
Greek, until of course Philip came and conquered them.

The article seems reasonably balanced to me. Whether ancient Macedonian
is some wayward dialect of Greek - as incomprehensible to their southern
neighbors as certain Lowland Scots dialects are to us southerns - or
whether it should be considered a separate language is not clear in view
of the paucity of the evidence.

Armenian does have some affiliation to Greek, but I would not place on
the same branch as Jona Lendering does. also the inclusion of
Thracian/Phrygian on the same branch must be considered speculative, as
our knowledge of these langs is somewhat limited, due to lack of
evidence, tho what we do have points to their being of IE derivation.

But, as I say, I by and large go along with the article - and I most
certainly agree "it must be stressed that, unlike modern politicians and
some modern scholars argue, language says not much about ethnicity." The
Saami & Finns speak related language, but I understand they are quite
different ethnically.

> Could anyone here point me to some reputable sources,
> so that I can avoid looking thru the weird stuff?
'Fraid not - because I haven't looked.

>
>                                             Andreas
>
>
> * My favourite nutty claim on the subject has to be that the modern Macedonian
> language is not a Slavic language, but the descendant of ancient Macedonian,
> not closely related to either Slavic or Greek.
Good grief!! That's as weird as the claim one sometimes meets that
modern Albanian is essentially the same as ancient Etruscan - or that
all the worlds languages are descended from Basque   ;)

--
Ray
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