Academic literature on the topic 'Macedonian language (Ancient)'

The questions are: Where are the ‘footprints’ of the ancient Macedonian Macedonians’ toponyms and vocabulary, remaining in the linguistic-semantic fund that would witness the continuity of historical development and transformation, respectively, the “antico-Slavic mixing” that has been widely claimed by some Macedonian historian? “What are the remaining words of the ancient Macedonian heritage, even of the language of the old Greeks old neighbors who would testify to their every day contacts?”, when we see that today’s vocabulary fund of the Macedonian language is strictly Slavic, except for Turkish and Bulgarian-Serbian borrowings and the modern inflows of internationalisms and technicalities? Where are the old ancient Macedonian words which the Macedonian Slavic language today inherited, however few were they ?! The ancient language dictionary of the ancient Macedonian tribe should have definitely left a mark on today’s Macedonian language vocabulary, as they have left the mark of the old Anglo-Saxon in today’s English language or the language of Old Gallons in the French language today. This is the fact of the missing points of contacts between these two cultures, among others....

A judicious combination of literary sources and archaeological research has often offered rewarding historical insights. In Macedonian studies such attempts have tended to be less fruitful, due to the scanty nature of the material and literary evidence. Now that archaeological investigation has expanded so widely in Northern Greece, it may be time to reassess aspects of Macedonian culture which have in the past been tackled with more enthusiasm than actual evidence, not surprisingly in view of the age-long interest in the people who shaped the Hellenistic world.

The Romanian population of the Balkans is distributed unevenly throughout the peninsula. In particular, in Macedonia, the Aromanians mainly live dispersedly within the Slavic settlements, however some city areas and even separate settlements might be considered Aromanian enclaves. In June 2022, a ten-day ethnolinguistic expedition took place in the city of Kruševo and in the villages nearby Bitola (North Macedonia). The purpose of this field survey was to study the Aromanians living close to the Macedonian population in this area. Despite the preservation of the historical memory and their own distinct identity from those around them, the native speakers of the Aromanian very infrequently use their own idiom. In everyday communication and even in the family, the Aromanians give preference to the commonly used Macedonian language. Constant intensive contacts of the Slavic and non-Slavic populations contributed to the linguistic and cultural interference in the traditions under discussion. This article aims to acquaint the reader with the folk tradition on the example of the commemorative practices common in the Balkan region under consideration. The funeral and memorial rite was chosen as the main topic, since it is in its structure that one can find the most archaic elements of traditional folk culture, reflecting ancient mythological ideas. There are also contemporary dialect texts in the Macedonian language, recorded from often bilingual native speakers. Detailed ethnolinguistic descriptions of the funeral and memorial rites give an idea of the archaic elements of the traditional folk culture, borrowed and developed in contacts. The fragments of the Eastern Romanian tradition are reflected in the rituals borrowed and adopted by the Slavs, and vice versa ― the terminological vocabulary was borrowed into Aromanian idiom.

This encyclopedia is the first English language reference source to focus exclusively on ancient Iran during the period of its great empires before the arrival of Islam from 700 BCE to 651 CE. The major empires were the Medes, the Achaemenids, the Seleucids, the Arsacids (Parthians), and the Sasanians. Ancient Iran covered a geographic area that varied over time. At its greatest expanse the Achaemenid Empire (559–330 BCE) ruled territory continuous from Thrace in southeastern Europe to the Indus River in India. Almost as large was the Seleucid Empire (305–125 BCE) which was not Iranian or Persian but Macedonian, founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals after his death. With the expansion of the empires through military conquests and the administrative control of vast geographic areas, Kia emphasizes that languages, ethnicities, religions, and cultures of the Persian empires were very diverse and that Persia itself was actually a southern province of Greater Iran.

Abstract It is widely accepted that Alexander attempted to persuade his Macedonian followers to accept the Persian practice of proskynesis (possibly, but not necessarily involving prostration), that this was opposed by members of his court, and that the attempt was given up. This article re-examines the evidence and the assumptions, both ancient and modern, that lie behind the episode as reported. It argues that the words proskynesis and proskynein had a range of meanings in Greek, but were primarily associated with Greek ideas of Persian behaviour; the gestures covered by the term proskynesis were not primarily associated with the gods by Greeks; the depiction of Callisthenes as representing principled opposition to Alexander is fictitious; the objection to the adoption by Alexander of ‘barbarian’ practices reflects Roman prejudices, rather than any concern of Alexander's contemporaries; the surviving literary sources do not provide reliable evidence for any ‘experiment with proskynesis’ by Alexander.

National myths in modern Europe and denial Macedonian identity The independence proclamation of the Republic of Macedonia in 1991 provoked ardent reactions and denials by its neighbours, against the fact that she was the only peaceful actor in the Yugoslavia’s dissolution. The first negative reactions and denials came from the Southern Neighbor, whose denial was directed towards the name, i.e. the identity, while the others referred to the language, identity and even a part of the territory. The most vociferous and at the same time the most successful was the reaction of the Southern Neighbour, who gained support of the European ‘democrats’, which de facto turned them into accomplices in the open blackmail that demanded the Republic of Macedonia to change its constitutional name. Namely, the 1992 Lisbon Declaration of the E(uropean) C(ouncil) imposed a demand to the Republic of Macedonia to accept any name that would not contain the word “Macedonia” in order to be recognized by the EU!?! The newly independent state was finally admitted to the UN under a reference “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” through violation of the provisions of the UN Charter. Twenty years later the country is still enforced to use the offensive reference, and often even to tolerate the FYROM acronym. This article deals precisely with the politics of pressures and blackmail exercised by NATO and EU with regard to the so‑called name dispute. It also centers on national myths that are used in order to “justify” such politics and on the attitude of the European ‘democrats’ towards those national myths. In contrast to the democratic rules preached by NATO and EU across the world, the Republic of Macedonia was and still is blackmailed by an unprincipled demand to select a NEW name in order to please one member-state. As a consequence of that demand, the national myth linked with ancient Macedonians (so-called antiquisation, although the better term is antique-mania) has been revived and upgraded. A number of pseudo-historians with various professional backgrounds, such as journalists, politicians, writers, physicians, and even university professors, has involved in this endeavor. To make things worse, even some historians and archaeologists may be seen in this group, with a mission to defend the right to the name and identity. The societal climate has been politicized to such a degree that not only the neighbours, but even EU has been caught in the vicious circle of competing and mutually exclusive national myths. The Union obviously insists on the philhellenic myth i.e. on the alleged Hellenic roots of the European culture as such. Mity narodowe współczesnej Europy i negowanie tożsamości macedońskiej Niepodległość Republiki Macedonii - państwa, które w 1991 roku drogą pokojową odłączyło się od struktur Jugosławii - wywołała ostre spory z jej sąsiadami. Pierwszy wywołał jej połu­dniowy sąsiad, negując jej nazwę, pozostali sąsiedzi podważali natomiast jej język, tożsamość i prawo do części terytorium. Najgłośniejszy i najbardziej skuteczny w tych działaniach okazał się sąsiad południowy, który otrzymał wsparcie demokracji europejskich, przyczyniając się do tego, że Europejczycy stali się de facto współodpowiedzialni za szantażowanie RM w celu zmiany jej konstytucyjnej nazwy. W oparciu o Deklarację Lizbońską z 1992 roku Rada Europy uwarunkowała uznanie Republiki Macedonii tylko wtedy, gdy z konstytucyjnej nazwy państwa usunięte zostanie słowo Macedonia. Niespotykanym dotąd precedensem w historii ONZ stało się przyjęcie nowego państwa do jej struktur pod nazwą „Była Jugosłowiańska Republika Macedonii”, skróconej do uwłaczającego akronimu FYROM.W artykule podjęto kwestię dotyczącą nacisków ze strony NATO i UE wobec tzw. problemu nazwy a także mitów narodowych, którymi usprawiedliwia się tę politykę oraz stosunku demokracji europejskich wobec tych mitów. Jednak wbrew zasadom demokracji, jakie szerzy UE i NATO, Republika Macedonii była i nadal jest szantażowana bezzasadnym żądaniem znalezienia NOWEJ nazwy według żądań jednego z jej członków.Następstwem tych działań w RM stało się odnowienie i rozszerzenie narodowego mitu o związki z Macedończykami antycznymi. Nieodłącznym elementem towarzyszącym temu zjawisku jest turbo folk oraz wsparcie pseudohistoryków wszelkich profesji: dziennikarzy, polityków, literatów, lekarzy a nawet profesorów uniwersyteckich. Najbardziej zatrważającym – w celu ochrony właściwej nazwy państwa dowodzącej tożsamości – stało się włączenie do tego nurtu zawodowych historyków i archeologów.Sytuacja uległa upolitycznieniu do takiego stopnia, że nie tylko sąsiedzi, ale również UE wkroczyła do magicznego kręgu demonstrowania mitów narodowych, odwołując się do filohelleńskiego mitu rzekomych helleńskich korzeni kultury europejskiej.

The Ethnic Character of Ancient Epirotes and MacedoniansThe inhabitants of Epirus and Macedonia were treated as “barbarians” by ancient Greeks (so Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Ps.-Scylax, Ps.-Scymnus, Strabo, and others). According to Plutarch (Pyrrhus I 3), the intensive hellenization of Epirus started with Tharrypas’ reign in the end of fifth century BC. According to Strabo (VII 7.8), ancient Epirotes and Macedonians spoke the same language but some of them were bilingual. This means that the original language of Epirotes and Macedonians was non-Greek, but they used Greek in the capacity of the international language of the East Mediterranean area. Numerous preserved glosses demonstrate an Indo-European (and non-Greek) origin of Epirotes and Macedonians.

Метою даної статті є дослідження розвитку фонетичної форми та семантики, визначення походжен-ня та поширення слова салаш у говірках карпатського ареалу, а також у континуумі балканських та слов’янських мов. Робота проведена в руслі традиційних проблем балканських та карпатських сту-дій, кінцевою метою яких є збирання, опис семантики та вивчення походження ідіоетнічної куль-турної лексики давнього пастушого населення цього етномовного континууму, зрозуміти шляхи і час утворення цього етнокультурного феномена та його спільної лексики.Матеріалом для аналізу у статті послужили загальномовні, спеціальні та діалектні словники, а також діалектологічні атласи та лінгвістичні карти слов’янських і балканських мов (української, російської, словенської, болгарської, македонської, сербської, словацької, польської, румунської та ін.) та їх карпатських діалектів. У дослідженні використано методи семантико-фонетичного аналі-зу варіантів слова у лексикографічних джерелах, інтерпретації лінгвістичних карт, етимологічного аналізу.Лексема салаш, яка входить до карпато-балканського етнокультурного словника, давно була за-писана діалектологами і її семантика вивчалася багатьма дослідниками мов і діалектів цього ареалу, картографувалася у численних діалектних та ареальних лінгвістичних атласах. Але щодо походжен-ня цього слова висловлювалися різні припущення і єдиної думки в дослідників до цього часу не було. На основі проведеного дослідження ми визначаємо номінативну модель, за якою утворено цей карпатизм угорського походження, як дериваційно-метонімічну фінітивну модель «функція – дім», лексему за утворенням як девербативний фінітив із первісною семантикою ‘місце зупинки, ночів-лі’, утворений від угорського дієслова száll ‘зупинятися на ночівлю’.Порівняльне вивчення семантики діалектного слова салаш дозволило визначити такий розвиток його основних та похідних значень: ‘місце для ночівлі’, ‘сезонне тимчасове житло’, ‘будівля для до-машніх тварин’, ‘будівля для пастухів’, ‘господарство пастухів у горах’, ‘стадо’, ‘табір’, ‘будь-яке тим-часове житло’. Порівняльно-історичне дослідження, проведене із залученням широкого діалектного матеріалу різних мов досліджуваного континууму, дозволило остаточно прийняти угорську етимо-логію слова салаш, яке спочатку було поширене в карпатських говірках на позначення пастушого тимчасового житла, а згодом проникло в сусідні мови усіх Балкан і всієї Славії, змінивши свою фонетичну форму та семантику від конкретного до широкого значення ‘будь-яке тимчасове житло з хворосту та гілок’.The aim of this paper is to study the development of the phonetic form and semantics of the word salash, to determine its origin and distribution in the dialects of the Carpathian area as well as in the continuum of Balkan and Slavic languages. The work is carried out in line with the traditional problems of Balkan and Carpathian studies, the ultimate goal of which is to describe the semantics and study the origin of the idioethnic cultural vocabulary of the ancient pastoral population of this ethnolinguistic continuum, and to understand the ways and the time of formation of this ethnocultural phenomenon.General, special, and dialect dictionaries as well as dialect atlases and linguistic maps of Slavic and Balkan languages (Ukrainian, Russian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovak, Polish, Romanian, etc.) and their Carpathian dialects served as the material for analysis in the paper. The research uses methods of semantic-phonetic analysis of word variants in lexicographic sources, the interpretation of linguistic maps, and etymological analysis.The lexeme salash, which is part of the Carpatho-Balkan ethnocultural dictionary, has long been recorded by dialectologists, its semantics has been studied by many researchers of languages and dialects of this area, and it has been mapped in numerous dialect and areal linguistic atlases. Various assumptions have been made about the origin of this word, and researchers have not yet agreed. Based on our research, we define the nominative model, according to which this Carpathianism of Hungarian origin was formed as a derivational-metonymic finitive model “function – home”, and the lexeme as a deverbative with the original semantics from the Hungarian verb száll ‘to stay overnight’.The comparative study of the semantics of the dialect word salash allowed to determine the following development of its basic and derived meanings: ‘a place to spend the night’, ‘seasonal temporary housing’, ‘a building for cattle’, ‘a building for shepherds’, ‘the shepherds’ farm in the mountains’, ‘a herd’, ‘a camp’, ‘any temporary building’. The comparative-historical study conducted with the involvement of a wide dialect material from various languages of the continuum under study allowed us to finally accept the Hungarian etymology of the word salash, which was first used in Carpathian dialects to denote shepherd’s temporary dwelling, and subsequently penetrated into the neighbouring languages of the whole Balkan and Slavic area, developing its phonetic form and semantics from the specific to the broad meaning ‘any temporary dwelling made of firewood and branches’.

This article aims to compare sacral and divine aspects of rulership in ancient China during Western Han dynasty and in the ancient Seleucid empire, with a focus on the divine origin of rulers, rulers as the chief priests, rulers as gods, and divine legitimacy. The cultural evolution involving ideas about the sacral role of rulers and their divinity will be presented, from ancient Macedonia to Seleucid empire and from Shang and Zhou dynasties through the Warring States period and Qin dynasty to the state of Western Han. The article aims to explore the above-mentioned aspects of sacral kingship to find out what forms these aspects took in both respective empires. The article aims particularly at the participation of rulers in local cults, the differences between ruler cults, celestial gods as the supreme authority, and gods connected with conquest and territory in order to contextualize our views of both Seleucid and Western Han empires, and by proxy the views on ancient China and ancient Hellenistic states.

Abstract The use of the toponym Macedonia by Greeks in Greece and by Slavs in the Republic of North Macedonia has been at the heart of a bitter international dispute between the two nations for nearly three decades. This issue has been the subject of much political wrangling and social concern on both sides, but it also has a historical linguistic dimension to it, pertaining to the evaluation of how the use of the toponym is supported or not by the relationship between the ancient Macedonian language and Ancient Greek. An examination of this linguistic side to the dispute reveals that well-known and well-supported principles of historical linguistics have often been ignored in assessments of the position of the languages relative to one another, with practitioners in some instances being motivated seemingly more by political ideology than by good science.

Abstract Book 1 of the Canones restated Scaliger’s earlier work on calendars, some of it solid but much of it wilful, in the apparently rigorous language of mathematical tables. On reconversion into, plain qualitative English, much of this material disappoints. Book 2, by contrast, looks more conventional, even traditional, than anything in any version of the De emendatione. Scaliger leads off with a list of 121 historical epochs, all of them assigned to specific Julian years and many to Julian days as well. He then offers lists of rulers: Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Macedonians, Babylonians, Persians, Arabs, Caliphs of Baghdad and Damascus, Ottoman Sultans, Chinese, Trojans, Lydians, Mermnadae, Pergamese, Tyrians, Jews, Sicyonians, priests of Apollo Karneius, Argives, Mycenaeans, Athenians, Spartans, Corinthians, Macedonians, Latins, Aeneadae, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Suevi, Lombards, Vandals, and Exarchs of Ravenna. The whole display fills 52 folio pages in the second edition of the Canones.

Abstract For a modern observer in the Balkans, traces of the region’s prehistory and early history are readily found. Visitors can explore the tells (sites of ancient settlements where successive layers of homes created large artificial hills) of the Bulgarian plains, the Lion Gate at the fortress of Mycenae in Greece, or the magnificent remains of Diocletian’s palace in Split, Croatia. Other traces can be heard in the Greek, Albanian, and Romanian languages whose progenitors were all spoken on the Balkan Peninsula in classical times. Still others can be tasted, in the olives and wine grapes brought to the Balkans by prehistoric settlers more than four thousand years ago. Even some of the modern political problems of the Balkans can be linked directly to classical times—such as the ongoing dispute between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia as to which state has the right to claim the legacy of Alexander the Great.

This paper discusses the ways in which the vernacular language of the capital city of Sofia, Bulgaria, reflects a history of contested borders. A relatively small but ancient settlement, Sofia became the capital of the new principality when the San Stefano borders were redrawn and contracted by the Congress of Berlin in 1878. In response the capital was relocated in 1879 from Veliko Tarnovo in the eastern dialect area to Sofia in the western, a strategically semiotic move intended to re-center the Bulgarian capital with respect to the prior borders and to position the government for future expansion. The government administration relocated en masse to Sofia thereby establishing a new urban elite with a more prestigious eastern dialect that would eventually become the main basis of the standard language. Despite decades of education in the standard language, however, western variants have persisted in the capital to this day, in part fuelled by 20th century waves of migration from what is today Aegean and North Macedonia. With the post-1989 fall of communism and the end of state-controlled media, this western variant now appears in and often dominates public spaces much to the dismay of language codifiers and purist-minded members of the public. Three theoretical approaches are employed to account for this persistence of the western variant. Social network theory will be used to analyze the sociolinguistic dynamics of language variants in Sofia. Critical discourse analysis recognizes the mutually constitutive nature of social practice and language use and the role of power relations — particularly relevant once the western variant of Sofia lost its prestige to the newly arrived eastern variant. Finally, language variation is conceptualized as a social semiotic system in which variants are indexically mutable so that speakers make socio-semiotic moves by deploying variants in certain contexts with certain interlocutors.