http://ancient-medieval-macedonian-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/hellenicity-of-barbarian-macedonians.html - The Hellenicity of the “barbarian” Macedonians

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Il3C_PAhgz0/SWe2zENuf3I/AAAAAAAAAlI/zduKKixxwDA/s1600-h/Philip+Ivory+Shield.jpg">

Parts of the Phillip ivory shield that found in Vergina Tomb. You can see clearly the two Pan-Hellenic symbols in ancient Greece: The 16th Sun/Star(Vergina Sun) and the Meander(Greek key). The shield itself can be found in the museum of Vergina in Central Macedonia of Greece

DEFINITION OF THE “HELLENICITY” AND “BARBARIAN”

The invention of a barbarian antitype provided a completely new mechanism for defining the Hellenic identity. During the Archaic period, Hellenic self-definition was ”aggregative”. That is to say, it was constructed by evok­ing similarities with peer groups which were then cast in terms of ficticious kin relationships within the 'Hellenic Genealogy'. Hellenicity was defined contrary through differential comparison with a barbarian out-group. At this point, however, some qualification is necessary. By oppositional self-definition, Jonathan Hall means simply that perceived differences served as a basis for the construction of a specifically Hellenic identity. [1]

Hall argues at greater length in his books and articles in the 5th century, mainly as a consequence of the Persian Wars, the definition of Greek identity evolved from an “aggregative” no inclusive conception based on fictitious descent from the eponymous Hellen and expressed in forged genealogies (which may leave outside not only Macedonians and Magnetes, but also other goups such as Arcadians or Aitolians) into an “oppositional” one, turned against out-groups, relegating thus (fictitious) community of blood to the same level –if not to an inferior one (vide infra)– as linguistic, religious and cultural criteria. In this perspective there is not much sense in opposing a putative compact, homo­geneous and immutable “Greekness” to the contested identities of groups such as the Aitolians, Locrians, Acarnanians, Thesprotians, Molossians, Chaones, Atintanias, Parauaians Orestians, Macedonians.

The Greek tribes quickly noticed that they did not speak the same tongue as their neighbours, and used the term "βάρβαρος" ("barbarian") for them, with the meanings "uncultured", "uncivilized" or "speaker of a foreign language". The term βάρβαρος is thought to be onomatopoeic in origin: "bar-bar"—i.e. stammering—may have been how the speech of foreign peoples sounded to Greek speakers. [2]

BARBARIAN IDENTIFICATION FROM THE ANCIENT GREEKS

According to several ancient writers named as barbarians all those who spoke a different tongue [Polybius, "History", 9-38-5; Strabo, "Geographica", 7-7-4; Herodotus, "Histories", book I, 56 and II, 158]

Discrimination between Hellenes and barbarians lasted until the 4th century BC. Euripides thought it plausible that Hellenes should rule over barbarians, because the first were destined for freedom and the other for slavery.[ Iphigeneia at Aulis, 1400 ]

Aristotle came to the conclusion that "the nature of a barbarian and a slave is one and the same".[Republic,I,5]

Aristophanes calls the illiterate supervisor a "barbarian" who nevertheless taught the birds how to talk.[The Birds, 199] The term eventually picked up a derogatory use and was extended to indicate the entire lifestyle of foreigners, and finally coming to mean "illiterate" or "uncivilized" in general. Thus "an illiterate man is also a barbarian".[The Clouds, 492 ]

According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st cent BC), a Hellene differed from a barbarian in four ways: refined language, education, religion, and the rule of law. In more detailing defined Hellenicity yas speaking the Greek language, having a Greek way of life, acknowledging the same gods and having fitting, reasonable laws. [Roman Antiquities, 1, 89, 4]

Isocrates declared in his speech Panegyricus: "So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent."[Panegyricus, 50]

Racial differentiation faded away through the teachings of Stoics, who distinguished between nature and convention and taught that all men have equal claim before God and thus by nature cannot be unequal to each other. In time, Hellene, to use the words of Isocrates, became a trait of intellect, not race.

Alexander the Great's conquests consolidated Greek influence in the East by exporting Greek culture into Asia and permanently transformed education and society in the region.

Greek education became identified with noble upbringing. Paul of Tarsus (a non Greek) considered it his obligation to preach the Gospel to all men, "Hellenes and barbarians, both wise and foolish".[Epistle to the Romans, 1, 14 ]

THE MACEDONIANS

The beginnings of Macedonian history are shrouded in complete darkness. There is keen controversy on the ethno­logical problem, whether the Macedonians were Greeks [3] or not [4]. Linguistic science has at its disposal a very limited quantity of Macedonian words, and the archaeological ex­ploration of Macedonia has hardly begun. And yet when we take into account the political conditions, religion and morals of the Macedonians, our conviction is strengthened that they were a Greek race and akin to the Dorians. Having stayed behind in the extreme north, they were unable to participate in the progressive civilization of the tribes which went further south, and so, when in the time of the Persian Wars they emerged on the horizon of the other Greeks, they appeared to them as non-Greeks, as barbarians.

When Alexander I of Macedon, who, though a vassal of Xerxes, had in the Persian War given many proofs of his sympathy with the Greek cause, desired to take part in the Olympic Games, to which only Hellenes had access, he was at first refused as a barbarian, and it was only when by a bold fiction he traced back the pedigree of his house, the Argeadae, to the Heraclid Temenus of Argos, that he was admitted as a competitor. Since then the kings of Mace­donia passed with the Greeks as Hellenes, and as descend­ants of Heracles; but, as before, so afterwards, the people were regarded as barbarians—even by Isocrates in his 'Philip'—though in the meantime many kings had done much for the introduction of Greek culture into their country. Even in Philip's day the Greeks saw in the Macedonians a non-Greek foreign people, and we must remem­ber this if we are to understand the history of Philip and Alexander, and especially the resistance and obstacles which met them from the Greeks. The point is much more important than our modern conviction that Greeks and Macedonians were brethren; this was equally unknown to both, and therefore could have no political effect. [5]

Quite apart from the local separation of the two peoples, the barbaric impression which the Macedonians made on the Greeks is explained by the close relationship in which the Macedonians lived for centuries with their barbarian neighbours, the Illyrians in the West, and the Thracians in the East. A strong Illyrian and Thracian influence can thus be recognized in Macedonian speech and manners. These however are only trifles compared with the Greek character of the Macedonian nationality; for example, the names of the true full-blooded Macedonians, especially of the princes and nobles, are purely Greek in their formation and sounds. [6]

Above all, the fundamental features of Macedonian poli­tical institutions are not only Greek but primitive Greek, a Homeric Greek. The old patriarchal monarchy over people and army lasted here down to the days of Philip and Alexander, a monarchy such as had once existed in all Greek tribes, until it had to give way to aristocratic forms of government under the dissolving influence of the Polis. One of the factors which explain the tenacious retention of the old monarchy is that the progressive idea of the Polis had not entered Macedonia. Another point is that the power of the king, who was supreme general, judge and priest, was tem­pered by the fact that the old Greek community in arms, in whose eyes the king was primus inter pares—which had once existed in primitive times among the Greeks—main­tained itself down to Alexander's day, and beyond, in the assembly of the army, which was possessed of definite privi­leges. But the Argeads were not at first lords of the whole Mace­donian nation. Originally the tribes of Upper Macedonia, the Lyncestae, Orestae and Elimiotae had their own princes or kings. Tedious struggles were necessary to incor­porate them into the Macedonian state, and it is likely that the mediatisation of these princely houses was only com­pleted under Philip, by whose hand the unified Mace­donian state was thus constituted. [7]

THE HELLENICITY OF THE MACEDONIANS

Jonathan Hall proceeds to a penetrating analysis of the shifting definitions of Hellenicity in Herodotus, Thucydides and Isocrates, our main sources for the evolution of the concept in the Classical period. About Thucydides in particular he writes that, contrary to Herodotus, he did not view Greeks and barbarians “as mutually exclusive categories” but as “opposite poles of a single, linear continuum”. Thus, the inhabitants of north-western Greece “are ‘barbarian’ not in the sense that their cultures, customs, or behavior are in direct, diametrical opposition to Greek norms but rather in the sense that their seemingly more primitive way of life makes them “Hellènes manqués”. [8] [9]

Hall challenges the view that Macedonia was marginal or peripheral in respect to a Greek centre or core, for the simple reason that such a Greek hard core never existed, since “‘Greekness’ is constituted by the totality of multifocal, situationally bound, and self-conscious negotiations of identity not only between poleis and ethne but also within them”, and because a view such as this “assumes a transhistorically static definition of Greekness” [10]

Jonathan Hall in his conclusions affirm the doubts about the possibility of answering the question concerning the “nationality” of the ancient Mace­donians. “To ask whether the Macedonians ‘really were’ Greek or not in anti­quity“, he writes, “is ultimately a redundant question given the shifting semantics of Greekness between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C. What cannot be denied, however, is that the cultural commodification of Hellenic identity that emerged in the fourth century might have remained a provincial artifact, confined to the Balkan peninsula, had it not been for the Mace­donians” [11]

There is also one more element which confirms the Hellenicity of the Macedonians. The epigraphic evidence of recent decades has also yielded a vast number of personal names. These are not only purely Greek from the very start, but also have a distinct local character which precludes the possibility of their being borrowed from the colonies on the coast. Epigraphic data of capital linguistic interest which have become available only after the Center of Hellenic Studies Colloquium of 1997 from Professor Miltiadis Hatzopoulos and important recent monographs and articles which seem not to have been accessible in the United States, if known, would have provided additional arguments and prevented some minor inaccuracies. [12]

Other epigraphic unique evidence are the “theorodokoi” catalogues which precisely list the Greek states (among them and Macedonia) visited by the theoroi, the sacred envoys, of the Pan-Hellenic sanctuaries and invited to participate through official delegations in sacrifices and contests celebrated in those sanctuaries. [13]

CONCLUSION

The question “Had the Macedonians an Hellenic consciousness ?” or "Were the Macedonians Greeks ?" perhaps needs to be chopped up further. The Macedonian kings emerge as Greeks by namely shared blood, and personal names indicate that Macedonians generally moved north from Greece. The kings, the elite, and the generality of the Macedonians were Greeks by criteria of religion and language. Macedonian customs were in certain respects unlike those of a normal polis, but they were compatible with Greekness, apart, perhaps, from the institutions which I have characterized as feudal. The crude one-word answer to the question has to be "yes."

NOTES
[1]- Jonathan Hall, Hellenicity, 2002, page 179
[2]- Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1989, "barbarous"
[3]- Ulrich Wilcken in “ Ancient Greek History” and in “Alexander The Great” - N.G.L. Hammond, Wallbank and Errington in three volumes “History of Macedonia”- Ian Worthington in his last book “Philip of Macedonia” e.t.c.
[4]- E. Badian, “Greeks and Macedonians”, in Beryl Bar-Sharrar – E. N. Borza (eds.), Macedonia and Greece in Late Classical and Early Hellenistic Times and in “Herodotus on Alexander I of Macedon: A Study in some Subtle Silences”, in S. Hornblower (ed.), Greek Historiography,-E. N. Borza, in “the Shadow of Olympus” and in “The Emergence of Macedon”.
[5]- Volume “Macedonia: 4000 years of Greek History”, article from Sakellariou
[6]- Jean Kalleris, Les Anciens Macedoniens. Etude linguistique et historique
[7]- Ulrich Wilcken in “Ancient Greek History”, Greek edition, page 213
[8]- Irad Malkin (editor), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, Harvard Univeristy 2001, Contested Ethnicities: Perceptions of Macedonia within Evolving Definitions of Greek Ethnicity, page 169-172
[9]- Miltiadis Hatzopoulos, Macedonian Identities, Patakis publishing, 2008, Contested Ethnicities: Perception of the self and the other: the case of Macedon, page 51
[10]- Irad Malkin (editor), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, Cambridge, Mass. and London 2001, Contested Ethnicities: Perceptions of Macedonia within Evolving Definitions of Greek Ethnicity, page 166
[11]- Irad Malkin (editor), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, Cambridge, Mass. and London 2001, Contested Ethnicities: Perceptions of Macedonia within Evolving Definitions of Greek Ethnicity, page 172
[12]- Miltiadis Hatzopoulos in “Macedonian institutions under the kings,1996” and Giannis Xydopoulos “ Social and cultural relations of Macedonians and the other Greeks, 2006”
[13]- Miltiadis Hatzopoulos, Macedonian Identities, Patakis publishing, 2008, Contested Ethnicities: Perception of the self and the other: the case of Macedon, page 55

http://ancient-medieval-macedonian-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/hellenicity-of-barbarian-macedonians.html - http://ancient-medieval-macedonian-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/hellenicity-of-barbarian-macedonians.html

Because Johnathan Hall does not believe "the kings, the elite, and the generality of the Macedonians were Greeks by criteria of religion and language." as you concluded after reviewing some of his works but "If the Aetolians spoke what they wrote, they conversed in a West Greek dialect, but it was one that Thucydides (3.94.5) found incomprehensible; the same is probably true of the Macedonian dialect" and moreover "Language and dialect [...] cannot be regarded as criteria of ethnicity".

Let's not underestimate the Greek colonies. I am not so sure about the Illyrian territory, but at least the Pontic Greek colonies produced a large number of inscriptions. In Olbia alone centuries of Greek presence are attested by hundreds of inscriptions ( http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/gis?region=6 - http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/gis?region=6 - browse the collections I.Olbia or IGDOlbia ) and that's true for several other cities along the Black Sea coast having a barbarian hinterland and arguably significant barbarian presence in cities (Ovid's poems are particularly illustrative in this regard, and the hundreds of Greek inscriptions found in Tomis and its surroundings are largely mute about the Getic and/or Scythian languages spoken in this city: http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/gis?region=5 - http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/gis?region=5 - IScM II volume holds alone more than 400 inscriptions). Not only epigraphy is hiding the languages the various natives spoke, but also, in general, the archaeology fails to make the difference. For instance, in Classical Olbia and the Scythian World (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2007), Kryzhitskiy concludes there's no way we can safely estimate the barbarian presence in this city, and he discusses pottery (p. 19), weapons in male burials (p. 20), female burials (p. 20), prosopography (p. 21). And since I mentioned prosopography, this shows the Greek culture irradiated outside these cities, for instance we even have barbarians kings wearing arguably Greek names (e.g. Dromichaites, his kingdom probably was located in north-eastern Bulgaria; for the Greekness of his name see Eusthatius' comments on the Homeric poems, attesting the word 'dromichaites', using it in syntagms like 'dromichaites hippos' and paralleling it with adjectives like 'kyanochaites' or 'glaukochaites'). However, the significant influence of Greek culture is to be found also in locations remote from the coastal Greek colonies (e.g. the Celtic and Dacian oppida on Middle Danube contain also imported Greek pottery, inscribed Greek letters on walls - probably suggesting some Greek-speaking builders, coin imitations after Greek tetradrachms). And all these in contrast with a virtual absence of the native languages of these people in written forms (save for some isolated inscriptions, some of them controversial, however large areas did not produce a single inscription in a native language).
As for participating in Olympics or other such arguments, we do not know if a Greek-named, Greek-speaking inhabitant of a remote Greek city was Greek for 2 or 20 generations. 

On the other hand, the Macedonian inscriptions are mostly from the Classical period and later. Macedonia was largely outside the Mycenean civilization and few isolated discoveries cannot be convincing. In Christidis' A History of the Ancient Greek (2007) there's a map showing the Mycenean world and its trade and material cultural connections (p. 214-215) and Macedonia lies largely outside it (the northern extent of "Mycenean sphere of influence" is bordered on this map by Haliakmon river). The assumption that Macedonia had a large or even majoritarian Greek speaking population at this time doesn't seem supported by evidence (or if there is any, I don't know of it). Of course, being outside Mycenean world it doesn't mean it there were no Greek speakers at all.

As for the Dorian invasion, I don't know of any evidence except for a late literary tradition. I won't repeat Borza's arguments, because I'm sure you're familiar with them, I'll turn on Johnathan Hall's. For instance, in Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (2002), in the section "Dorian invasion: Fact or Fiction?" (p. 73-82), after enumerating some claims and arguments brought by scholars from 19-20th centuries for this invasion, Hall proceeds to cast some doubts:
- the so-called "Doric" institutional (e.g. Pindar's tethmoi, Thucydides' nomima Dorika) and religious (e.g. the cult of Apollo Karneois) features are not present in all Dorian cities (p. 77)
- John Chadwick's identification of one of the dialects of Linear B as proto-Doric places Dorians in central Greece, Peloponnese and Crete before their alleged invasion (p. 78)
- Antonio Lopez Eire and Maria Pilar Fernandez Alvarez showed independently that all the common innovatory features of the West Greek dialect group are to be found in at least one non-West Greek dialect, which suggests there's no single linguistic ancestor for these (as hypothesised by the proponents of the Dorian invasion theory)
- Several archaeologists (Desborough, Snodgrass et al) showed that the emergence of various allegedly Dorian archaeological markers (like violin-bow filbulae, cist graves, etc) and the destructions of the Mycenean palaces are not contemporary. Snodgrass described it as a "invasion without invaders" and James Hooker concluded "We may therefore boldly postulate that there never was a 'Dorian invasion' in the sense that speakers of Doric forcibly entered some of those areas of Greece previously occuped by Mycenaeans" (p. 78-79)
- in the end of this section Hall proceeds to show the non-unitary aspects of the Dorian invasion legends. While refraining to deny population movements towards the south, he points out that the evidence is elusive, that the composite nature of the tradition contradicts the notion of a one-time massive influx of Dorians, that even if such traditions come from an earlier period they do not allow us to invest them with historical authenticity and that whatever the Dorian migration literary accounts meant, it was not to replicate faithfully a past historical event (p. 79-82)

This article has many clashes such as

....It is also certain that the Macedonian language became increasingly hellenized.Evidence for the pronunciation of Macedonian in the second half of the fourth century can be found in the cuneiform texts from http://www.livius.org/ba-bd/babylon/babylon.html - Babylon . If Macedonian was still unaspirated and voiced when Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, the Babylonian scribes would have spelled the name of the king's brother, called http://www.livius.org/phi-php/philip/arridaeus.htm - Philippos in Greek sources, something like Bi-líp+ending. However, the first syllable is always Pi, which also represents a sound like /vi/. This suggests that the Macedonians had began  to aspire their consonants and were losing voice. The name Berenike (the Macedonian equivalent of Greek Pherenike) may also have been pronounced according to the Greek fashion, because it is rendered in Latin as Veronica.

The name Philippos(Φίλιππος), and Macedonian names in general in which the first component is φιλ, are written more frequently with φ from the beginn­ing of the written tradition; also, that φ and not β occurs in:

άμφοτερός, άρφύς, Βουκεφάλας, φάλαγξ, Φόβος, Φυλακαί and φύλαξ; χ and not γ in: άγχαρμος, διμάχαι, λόχος,-οχος, Πολυπέρχων, Χαρικλής and Χάρων; θ and not δ in ζέρεθρον, Θαΰλος Θούριδες and Πείθων.

Those who oppose the view that elements of Macedonian were Greek argue, of course, that the versions with φ, θ, χ, represent Macedonian names transmitted in Greek texts, and also names and words borrowed by the Macedonians from the Greeks. If the evidence of the Greek texts is ex­cluded, on the grounds that it is untrustworthy, then excep­tion cannot be made for those passages which attest to β, δ, γ in place of φ, θ, χ. If these latter are not excluded, and it is thus conceded that the Greek authors rendered the Macedonian pronunciation correctly by writing Βίλιππος etc., then it is illegitimate to assert that the versions with φ, θ, χ are errors. Furthermore, the spelling Φίλιππος is not attested solely in non-Macedonian texts; it also occurs on coins of Philip II, and on Macedonian arrows, and tiles of the same period.

It would be curious if the coins issued by the Macedonian state did not accurately reflect the national pronunciation. Let us concede, however, that Philip insisted that his name be written with Φ, since he had established the Attic dialect as the official language of the state: this explanation might account for the phonetic form of the royal name on the coinage, but not also on arrows and tiles. The hypothesis that Macedonian names and words having φ, θ, χ in place of β, δ, γ are borrowed from Greek has properly been countered with the hypothesis that this is unacceptable in the case of words like άρφύς, which is otherwise unknown; άγχαρμον, which had fallen into disuse in the rest of Greece; ζέρεθρον, which was used in the isolated region of Arcadia; χάρων, which in Macedonia was not used to mean 'Charon' but 'lion'.

Two conclusions emerge:

1) the pronunciation of the ancient bh, gh, dh as β, γ, δ, was not universal throughout Macedonia, but occurred alongside the pronunciation φ, χ, θ

2) the pronunciation φ, χ, θ appears in some words which could not have been borrowed by the Macedonians from a Greek people. In the light of these conclusions, we must look for some other explanation of the appearance of β, γ, δ in Macedonia.

Flipper, I am postponing my reply in order to finish reading some books. One I've just read is Margalit Finkelberg, Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition (2005)
The author is a classicist and this books gives some perspectives on ancient Greekness. For now, I'll just excerpt some bits related to the language of the ancient inhabitants of Macedonia:

p. 31: "Compare, for example, the case of the Phrygians. The Phrygians spoke an Indo-European language closely related to Greek, which allows us to suppose that their position as regards the Greeks could not have differed much from that of the Macedonians."

p. 121: "Thus Macedonian, for example, does not share with Greek at least one of the features identifying the unique idiom of the latter, namely, the devoicing of the IE voiced aspirates."

Here are also two dialectal maps, please note the outsideness of Macedonia:

p. 110, map 3:

p. 132, map 4:

Moreover, since Macedonian preserves the proto-Indoeuropean voiced aspirated, as against all other Greek dialects changing them to unvoiced aspirates. Macedonian must have started to differentiate itself earlier than any of the better known dialects. So that even though it had some developments in common with neighbouring Greek dialects, such as the infinite in -stai shared with Northwest Greek, more changes of vocabulary are likely to have occured in Macedonian even than was the case in Cretan and this is supported by the number of unusual words preserved as "Macedonian" in the glosses.

Speakers of Doric dialects or even an Aeolic one like Thessalian may have found Macedonian less difficult to follow, since it shared many features with them as against Attic-Ionic.

We should allow for the possibility that spoken Macedonian was as far from standard Attic as Sicilian is from Venetian, and that it may have been difficult to determine whether there were two separate languages or just two dialects even if we had better evidence.

You made this point that names change when adapted in a language and I agree, this is largely true. But what I actually attempted to show is that sometimes one cannot differentiate between a foreigner wearing that name transcribed in Greek and a Greek wearing a borrowed name. For sake of simplicity, I'll use the mother tongue as a sole criterion and I believe that unless there's some extra information, we can't say about someone named Ουαλεριος what his mother tongue was: Greek or Latin. Κλαυδιος Πτολεμαιος was perhaps born in a Greek speaking family, but many others named Κλαυδιος weren't. It's like today when we can't tell of a certain Lee living in the U.S. what his mother tongue is: Chinese, Korean, English or some other.

I promised I will bring more evidence of "barbarians" hiding under Greek names and epigraphy. Here is some (I'm not using copy-paste because of the diacritics which may not render correctly, consequently I apologize for any mistakes in transcriptions):

Besides typical "barbarian" names, in the manumissiones from Delphi (most from mid 2nd century BC), we find also several (freed) slaves with Greek names.
From the SGDI II collection ( http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/book?bookid=466 - http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/book?bookid=466 ) here are some examples of
Maioteans (Scythians?): 1992 - Αγαθων, 2163 - Ευταξια, Παρνασιος
Bastarnians: 1754 - Αριστω
Sarmatians: 2274 - Αφροδισια, 2142 - Ειρηνα, Φιλοκρατεια
Galatians (Celts): 1885 - Αγαθων
Thracians: 1902 - Διονυσιος, 1832 - Σωτηριχος
Phrygians: 1922 - Δημητριος

Another situation is when we have a "barbarian" father but a "Greek" son. The case of Thucydides is quite famous, but we can find this phenomenon in epigraphy, e.g. in the Thracian space, in IGB III.2 corpus ( http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/book?bookid=188 - http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/book?bookid=188 ), here are some persons whose father was named Auluzenis (a Thracian name):
1690 - Καστωρ Αυλουζενεος
1703 - Ερμογενης Αυλουζενεος
1832 - Απολ[λω]νιδης Αυλ[ου]ζενεος
What's even more interesting that there are situations in reverse, like in IGB V 5652 where we find a certain Αυλουζενις Ερμοδ[ω]ρου or like in the Pontic inscription CIRB 266 where we have someone named Παιρισαλος Ερακλειδου. I take Pairisalos to be an Iranian name(for Pairi- check Pairisades, the name of several Bosporan kings).

Some other good examples I found in the Egyptian papyri and ostraca, as in Egypt there were some Greeks, Macedonians, Thracians, etc. deployed as mercenaries or soldiers. For instance in the papyrus NYU 122 / 2.16 ( http://epiduke.cch.kcl.ac.uk/2008-07-21/html/p.nyu/p.nyu.2/p.nyu.2.16.html - http://epiduke.cch.kcl.ac.uk/2008-07-21/html/p.nyu/p.nyu.2/p.nyu.2.16.html http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/ldpd/app/apis/item?mode=item&key=nyu.apis.4852&dbg=1 - http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/ldpd/app/apis/item?mode=item&key=nyu.apis.4852&dbg=1 ) we find a Macedonian and a Thracian. The Macedonian's name is Serapion! Both fathers had the same name: Dionysios. How can one tell their ethnic identities only by considering their names? In another papyrus, NYU 71 / 2.14 ( http://epiduke.cch.kcl.ac.uk/2008-07-21/html/p.nyu/p.nyu.2/p.nyu.2.14.html - http://epiduke.cch.kcl.ac.uk/2008-07-21/html/p.nyu/p.nyu.2/p.nyu.2.14.html http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/ldpd/app/apis/item?mode=item&key=nyu.apis.4795&dbg=1 - http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/ldpd/app/apis/item?mode=item&key=nyu.apis.4795&dbg=1 ) we find more Thracians: Θεω[ν Ηρα]κλειδου, Ζωιλος Εκαταιου, Προξενος Προξενου. Theon, Herakleides, Zoilos, Hekataios, Proxenos - aren't these names Greek enough? And yet there were some Thracians in Egypt named that way.

With such examples at hand, I think it's hard to maintain that having a Greek name meant necessarily to have a Greek ethnic identity or even Greek mother tongue. We can at best assume that at some point those individuals became familiar with or fluent in Greek. Perhaps many were Greeks for many generations but we need positive evidence to argue for that. A large density of Greek names suggests a strong Greek culture and possibly also identity, but we may have the surprise to find other identities and languages obscured by such naming fashions. Whether the name was Greek or non-Greek but adapted to Greek, we can't really say what identity a particular person had or what was his mother tongue unless we have some more evidence to correlate and support such conclusions.

Now the other Ionians, and among them the Athenians, avoided the name, not wishing to be called Ionians, nay even now I perceive that the greater number of them are ashamed of the name: but these twelve cities not only prided themselves on the name but established a temple of their own, to which they gave the name of Panionion, and they made resolution not to grant a share in it to any other Ionians (nor indeed did any ask to share it except those of Smyrna);

 

Originally posted by Chilbudios b) It is not only a list of words, it is the testimony of ancient authors, as well. Plutarch, in Moralia (Greek Questions, question 9), testifies for this particularity of the Macedonian pronounciation (Plutarch speaks of Macedonian B instead of Ph). I assume the ancient ones must have heard something to write such a thing.

Yes, you're right about that. What i'm questioning is if that is a result of barbarophony or isolation and different development from Southern Greek. As you've seen dialects like Doric and Aeolic that are closer to archaism, still preserved words that included those rules.

Originally posted by Chilbudios c) The list of words is actually larger. As my previous post was about names and epigraphy, I'll be using Macedonian names to exemplify it. Scholars like O. Masson and M. Hatzopoulos suggested that several names from the inscriptions show this particularity. In IG I3 89, for instance: Γαιτεας instead of Χαιτεας Βυργινος instead of Φυρκινος Σταδμεας instead of Σταθμεας

But both Masson and Hatzopoulos in the end, concluded that Macedonians spoke a separate branch of Greek that followed a different development that the rest. That means, that that phenomenon did not trouble them so much to classify Macedonian as non-Greek because the sound laws.

Since you mentioned Hatzopoulos, here are some comments he made on the voice stops:

the vast majority of personal names, not only were perfectly Greek (Φίλιππος, Ἀλέξανδρος, Παρμενίων, Ἀντίπατρος, Ἀντίοχος, Ἀρσινόη, Εὐρυδίκη) but also presented original traits excluding the possibility of their being borrowed from the Attic dialect, which was the official idiom of the kingdom (Ἀμύντας, Μαχάτας, Ἀλκέτας, Λάαγος), indeed from any other Greek dialect (Πτολεμαῖος, Κρατεύας, Βούπλαγος).

One reason – perhaps the main one – for such resistance to the assimilation of new evidence and persistence of obsolete theories until these very last years is the way in which since the nineteenth century the scholarly discussion about Macedonian speech and its Greek or non-Greek character has focused on the sporadic presence in Macedonian glosses and proper names -- which otherwise looked perfectly Greek -- of the sign of the voiced stop (β, δ, γ) instead of the corresponding unvoiced, originally “aspirated” stop expected in Greek, as for instance in Βάλακρος and Βερενίκα instead of Φάλακρος and Φερενίκα.

What the partisans of such theories have not always explicitly stated is that they all rely on the postulate that the sounds rendered by the signs β, δ, γ in Macedonian glosses and proper names are the direct heirs of the series of voiced “aspirate” stops of Indo-European and do not result from a secondary sonorisation, within Greek, of the series represented by the signs φ, θ, χ. However, one must be wary of short-cuts and simplifications in linguistics. For instance, the sound /t/ in the German word “Mutter” is not the direct heir of the same sound in the Indo-European word *mater, but has evolved from the common Germanic form *moδer, which was the reflex of Indo-European *mater.

The example of Latin demonstrates that the evolution /bh/>/ph/>/f/>/v/>/b/, envisaged above, is perfectly possible. Thus, the form albus (“white”) in Latin does not come directly from Indo-European *albhos. In fact the stem albh- became first alph- and then alf- in Italic, and it was only secondarily that the resulting spirant sonorised into alv- which evolved into alb- in Latin (cf. alfu=albos in Umbrian and ἀλφούς˙ λευκούς in Greek).

He has written a lot, but i just quote some samples. The main point is that none of those you mentioned called Macedonian non-Greek language, but a dialect of separate development.

Basically, Macedonian is a similar case with Arcadian. However, thanks to early Cypriot and Cretan writtings we know Arcadian is Greek developed differently from a native pre-Greek language different from the other pre-greek substances that gave a character to Attic, Aeolic, Doric etc. In early Macedonian inscriptions we don't have complete sentences, like Arcadian to make a profile.

Also, each time i devote myself to this issue, i find new words in different Greek dialects (mainly Doric and Aeolic) that follow the same rules as Macedonian. Those words, are not borrowings but relics of archaism.



Now, i want to show you something interesting i've found. I guess you remember what i earlier said about geographic unrelated phenomenas similar to the Macedonian sound laws? The funny thing is that i found examples in the 2 places i originate from (upper Macedonia and Aeolia). Specifically, the following text is the local dialect of upper Macedonia, dated around the 60s.




Most Greeks, wouldn't understand easily this text. If the difference between Attic and Macedonian were as the text above and Greek Demotic, then it is fully understandable that Attic speakers could not comprehend Macedonians easily.

What is interesting with the modern Macedonian dialect above is the iotaism (use of i instead of Grek e) found in Thessalian, the turn of o to -u like Tsakonian Doric, the vowel dropping (eg. σκώθκι instead of σηκωθηκε and Περδικκας instead  of Περιδικαίος), the use of Δ instead of Θ (δα instead of θα).

Moreover, there are combinations of sounds that are highly unsual in Greek, but still that does not make the text non-Greek or non readable as Greek. Examples: εφκιάνει, σναζουμι, σκωθκι, δλεια. Before commenting that those are phenomenas of foreign influence, note that none of the surrounding languages have θ and δ. I would rather compare them to pre-Greek words like τλάθυμος, αρκρκοκλες̣ etc.

On the use of Δ instead of Θ compare the Macedonian Greek "δα σώσει τουν οργού μπρουστητίρα" and the Palladarian (Aeolia) "δα κολλούσε όλη η χώρα"



As I told you before, Aeolians moved to Aeolia with the comming of the Thessalians. The Aeolic speech of Thessaly probably changed a bit, while in Asia Minor, some archaic elements could have been preserved.

Also, the word κατούνια (furrow) cognates with the Kerkyrian καντούνια (furrow, narrow street). You know the passages about Upper Macedonians when it comes to dress and speech being similar in a line stretching to Epirus and Corfu.

The inscription http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/oi?ikey=153303&bookid=172&region=4&subregion=11 - http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/oi?ikey=153303&bookid=172&region=4&subregion=11

Ϝαλιος ἐμὶ τῆς Δολίο

could be compared with the above text's "η λάλας κι μι παράτωρσι" where "εμι" and "μι" is the equivalent of standard Greek εμε/με.

Now, another word, that is really suprising in the page above, is the word πιρπιρέϊ (pirpirei) which means butterfly (Greek ψυχάνθη, πεταλούδα) and has it's root to PIE peipel. While in other Greek dialects the meaning is metaphoric (soul of the flower, flying flower), in Macedonian Greek it has kept the PIE version. That could also be a phenomenon of isolation. We don't have an attestation of butterfly in Linear B to know if the Mycenaeans used a PIE rooted word for butterfly before the metaphor, but we know for example that Macedonian Kynagidas is the word used during Mycenaean times in Greece that later changed.

Also, note γνεκις (women, Att. γυναίκες, Aeolic Βανήκες, Myc. Ku-ne-ka, PIE gwen, gwna).

Last, as i told before, skepticism about Macedonian emerged in earlier times when epigraphic evidence was scarce. Even before the curse tablet of pella, the arethousa tablet and some other minor inscriptions, many scholars were quite sure.

John Antwerp Fine, suggests that most modern scholarship (back in 1983) recognise the dialect as Greek and it seems the skepticism was mostly an earlier debate.







-------------


Så nu tar jag fram (k)niven va!

The Greeks were cultural revolutionaries that held minds that changed the world, philosphophies that were beyond their time. They were truly the greatest Civilization producing innovations that were created with a single brilliant thought. However, they were wrong on their view towards the Macedonians. Alexander the Great was from this very kingdom and he was no where close to the concept of a barbarian. The story of Alexander and his horse, who i believe was a Unicorn, is an incredibly heartwarming one. The bond between the two was strong beginning when he received the wild Bucephalus (ox faced or Horned one) for his 13th birthday from his father. The creature could not be tamed, well that was until Alexander examined him. He soon realized that the reasoning behind the horse's fear was because of the shadow that was cast when the laborers would climb upon his back. But the young prince repositioned the gentle beast and showed him respect that a great horse(Unicorn) deserved and upon his back he mounted, and off into the future they rode. The two fought as one in many battles, and their friendship only growing stronger over the years. But then many years later when Alexander was around 30, tragedy struck at a grave battle and the mighty Bucephalus fell. This caused Alexander great grief and he named the city after his dear friend and had a statue made in honor of the noble Unicorn. Tragically, Alexander and his horse were connected through a bond much greater than the material world, for but a few years later he passed away as well and together Alexander and Bucephalus galloped away into the afterlife. The term Barbarian sounds like inhumane. But if one heard this story of Alexander and his horse(Unicorn) they would know of Macedonia's inner and outer humanity. And this is the conclusion that history can be interpreted anyway your heart desires, that is the beauty of the past itself, it may be set in stone, but there is still some carving needed to be done.