Ancient Macedonia

Of course, modern politics can not be based on ancient history. Scholars who allow themselves to be used for political purposes, overestimate the importance of their field of study. They also force others to digress longer and more often than they like on the relation between ancient Macedonia, the Slavs, and Greece, which must therefore be the leitmotiv of this article too. Those interested in the origin of the debate, can read the appendix.

Country

1. The fertile alluvial plain, watered by the rivers Haliacmon and the Axius, simply called Macedonia (or Lower Macedonia, to prevent confusion). It is situated immediately north of the holy mountain Olympus. In Antiquity, the plain produced sufficient cereals to permit export, but it was also rich in cattle, sheep, and remarkably strong horses. The coast is flat and there are only a few natural harbors, which helps to explain why the Macedonians never became a sea-faring nation.
2. The mountains, usually called Upper Macedonia. There were arable tracts but the country was predominantly pastoral. Its forests produced pitch and especially timber, there was some iron and gold mining, and hunters made sure that Macedonia could also export furs.

Although the two landscapes are different, they share a continental climate with cold winters. This climate makes the Macedonian vegetation different from the rest of the Aegean region.

Language

However, there is some room for doubt. To start with, there are also Macedonian names that have no Greek parallel (Arridaeus or Sabattaras). In the second place, in many semi-literate societies, there is a difference between the spoken and the written language. It would not be without parallel if a Macedonian, when he wanted to make an official statement, preferred decent Greek instead of his native tongue. (Cf. the altars of the goddess Nehalennia, which were all written in Latin, a language that was almost certainly not spoken by the people who erected them.)

Thirdly, many historical sources are written in Greek, and it was a common practice among Greek historians to hellenize foreign names. For example, the name of the powerful first king of the Persian empire, Kuruš, ought to be transcribed as Kourous or Kouroux in Greek, but became Kyros, because this looks like a Greek word ("Mr. Almighty"). The name that is rendered as Alexandros, which has a perfect Greek etymology, may in fact represent something like Alaxandus, which is not Greek. A related argument that forces us to hesitate is that the Greeks nearly always converted the names of foreign deities. Supreme gods like Jupiter and Marduk are called "Zeus". So, the fact that Greek authors use Greek names for Macedonian people and deities does not prove very much about the Macedonian language.

None of this forces us to say that the Macedonians did not speak Greek, but it leaves the possibility that things were not what they seem. There is room for skepticism.

This is why linguists take several remarks by the authors of ancient dictionaries, which otherwise might have been interpreted as indications for a mere difference in dialect, very seriously. For example, there is evidence that Greeks were unable to understand people who were makedonizein, "speaking Macedonian". The Macedonian king Alexander the Great was not understood by the Greeks when he shouted an order in his native tongue and the Greek commander Eumenes needed a translator to address the soldiers of the Macedonian phalanx. The Greek orators Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and Demosthenes of Athens called Macedonian kings like Archelaus and Philip II barbarians, which prima facie means that they did not�speak Greek. Now this happens in polemical contexts and is certainly exaggerated, but the statements need to refer to some kind of linguistic reality.

We know frustratingly little about the Macedonian language/dialect. For instance, we don't know anything about its grammar or syntaxis. We do not even know whether�the Macedonians spoke one language at all; many societies, now and then, have more than one language.�All we have is a set of about 150 words that were recognized as Macedonian in Antiquity, many of which are derived from a Macedonian-to-Greek dictionary by a man named Amerias. These 150 words can be divided into two groups:

1. Words that have a counterpart in Greek. For example, the Macedonian title Nikat�r ("victor") is obviously the equivalent of Greek Nik�t�r. Usually, the Macedonian words are voiced and lack aspiration whereas Greek words are voiceless and aspirated: for example, Greek aith�r is the equivalent of Macedonian ad� ("sky").
2. Words that do not resemble a Greek word: sarissa ("lance"), abagna ("rose"), peliganes ("senate"). It is certain that these words are Indo-European.

Much is still uncertain, but two conclusions appear to be irrefutable:

1. The Macedonians did not speak a Slavic language, which belongs to an altogether different branch of Indo-European, called Balto-Slavo-Germanic;
2. Macedonian and Greek were related but different, but it is not certain whether they were different languages (which means that they have a different grammar and syntaxis) or dialects.

Finally, it must be stressed that, despite what modern politicians and some modern scholars argue, language says not much about ethnicity. (People can speak Frisian and have a Dutch passport, whereas people speaking Dutch can live in Belgium and Surinam and feel offended when they are called Dutch.) The identification of "one language, one nation, one state", is nineteenth-century and says nothing about Antiquity. Still, language is one of the factors that is used to classify people, just like religion and a shared past, so it is not altogether irrelevant either.