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Ancient Macedonian LanguageThe Ancient Macedonian language (ISO 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 where Greek was common, during the 1st millennium BC, surviving into the early centuries of the Common Era. The language was closely related to Greek (forming a Greco-Macedonian group) and scholars have also cited its relation to the Phrygian, Thracian or Illyrian languages. Julius Pokorny in his Indo-European dictionary classifies the Macedonian language with Phrygian. 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 (in particular, from the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria). There are a number of classical references that indicate quite clearly that the Greeks viewed Macedonians as a rather separate ethnos, and recognized a marked difference between Macedonian and Greek (all known dialects considered). Most modern linguists consider that the Macedonian tongue was a separate language, not a dialect of Greek, though related to Greek. A number of differences have been identified, most notably, the voiced aspirated consonants did not become voiceless but were preserved (ex: Macedonian ' danos' from PIE *dhwene, while Greek has ' thanatos'). The ancient Macedonian lexical stock reveals a large number of words that do not have cognates in Greek, but do have in other Indo-European languages, including Thracian and Italic. There are also some words that do not have cognates in any other language, and may be of pre-Indo-European origin. As Greek influence increased, the Macedonian upper-class increasingly began to adopt Greek as their tongue, and over the centuries the native Macedonian fell out of favor and became relegated to the remote inland areas. Eventually, Greek supplanted it entirely, and the Macedonian language became extinct. There is an opposing school of thought that maintains that Macedonian was a Greek dialect. A recent proponent of this school is Professor Olivier Masson, who suggests that Macedonian was related to North-West Greek dialects; Masson admits that this is a tentative hypothesis that has yet to be verified. The view that Macedonian was a Greek dialect is less accepted among current linguists. See also References Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wrterbuch, Bern, 1959. External links
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