It\'s all Greek to me (Makedonians included) ...

[Ghostmojo]

It is very pleasing to see this thread now having reached its fourth page and I consider myself to be considerably better informed about this subject. Having said that, nothing has been said that changes my own basic views. What has appeared is considerable detail and dissection (as I would expect from such worthy and notable contributors) which deals with nuances, but ultimately we are still uncertain as to the exact story. Probably because there always has been more than one.

We also have no evidence that Macedonian was not easily understandable to Ionian/Aeolian or Doric Greeks apart from one text from Rufus (the one about Philotas needing a translator). All speculation is based on the words of Demosthenes, who called Philip a barbarian but never said that anyone did not understand the Macedonians.

That is not quite correct. We have evidence that "Macedonian speech" was a somewhat different thing to "standard Greek" and could be difficult to understand or speak. And not just in Curtius.

Plutarch writes (Alex. 51.6) that Alexander "sprang to his feet and called out in Macedonian speech a summons to his hypaspists..." (Makedonisti kalon tous hupaspistas). Arrian reports the same call but not in the "Macedonian speech". Arrian, in the Gothemburg palimpsest from memory ("Successors"), does describe Eumenes sending an officer - whose language was Macedonian - to the Macedonian phalanx infantry of Neoptolemus prior to the engagement stating that he would not engage them but would round them up with cavalry and prevent their getting to their baggage. His intention was to take over the Macedonians. This coheres with the surviving reports of the battle and clearly Eumenes wanted the phalanx infantry - the Macedonian "grunts" - to understand and so he sent a Macedonian.

I return to my own native patch as being somewhat instructive in all of this. The British Isles is of a similar size to Greece and its immediate isles, and also has the same issues with regard to language. Ignoring the non-English tongues (of which there are a few in all the constituent states) the variety of accents and dialects would be bewildering to English speakers from the Anglophone diaspora who often live in far larger geographic areas, but which have far less variation in the form of that spoken language. It is certainly true for example that there are strong regional accents in the United States of America - Boston, Texas, the deep south, New York City etc., but considering the sheer size of the territory concerned there are surprisingly few of them, and the more extensive middle areas have quite homogeneous speech styles. The same applies to Canada (save the Francophone areas) and I think much the same is also true of Australasia.

Conversely in the UK, especially in England we have hugely heterogeneous variations of English which can change in a very short distance i.e. the 35 miles between Liverpool and Manchester; the 50 or so miles between Manchester and Leeds; and the 100 miles between Leeds and Newcastle-Upon-Tyne; all show remarkable differences not just in accents (which can be barely intelligible to each other) but also in terminology and phraseology. These are all regional forms of English and not different languages. Go a little further north and crossing the border you can detect differences between the Scottish versions in both Glasgow and Edinburgh - the former being particularly difficult for other Brits to follow - and of course there is also the patois of Scots, which many supporters and users claim is a separate language, but in reality is just a very different kind of English with a huge variety of local words which make the grammar difficult to follow, even though the structured use of the language still follows the basic rules of English. Explore parts of Wales; the broad West Country (which gave birth to the North American accent); the south east with its polished Queen's English and diametrically opposed cockney (the ancestor of Australian and New Zealand speech styles); and into Ireland north and south for even more variation. The point is that even within a closely connected geographic entity, the variation in use of a common tongue can be enormous. All manner of factors have created this situation, usually to do with external influence (Norse, French, Celtic etc.) but the fact remains, despite the spectrum of use (which can result in translation being required) the nation basically speaks the same language - even though the British are obviously a union of peoples rather than one race.

Surely the same can be applied to the ancient Hellenes? The combined pastoralist tribes, who seem to have come under the leadership of the Temenids, whom we know as 'highland/mountain' (Orestai / Makedones) men of Makedon merely spoke a particularly strong version of North West Greek perhaps as distinctly different from the Athenian koine as Scots English was to a Londoner. Hesiod seemed to believe Makedonians spoke Greek when he equated the ancestral founder (Macedon) with other mythical founding figures, and also perhaps believed their patois had elements of Aiolic speech as well as Doric. This was in the seventh century [size=85:5fintaxn]BC[/size]. In the 6th century the Persians described the tribute paying people of this area as Greeks (and that could only be the Makedonians - pre Darios/Xerxes) ... 'yauna takabara'. Hellanikos also visited Makedon and his reinterpreting the founding myth figures by making Macedon no longer a cousin, but a son of Aiolos, is suggestive of his inclusion of this people and region as being part of the larger Greek family. It is my general view that those other Greeks of an academic, cultural (or otherwise) bent who tried to disrespect the Makedonians by grouping them with the barbarians did so merely as an expression of their own particular brand of Hellenic localism (as Stefanos has reminded us) which was exclusive rather than inclusive. And the more powerful one of these other groups became - the less the others liked it, and the less they felt they had in common. Ever the Greek disease...