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65-523: The word is derived from the Ancient Macedonian word pélla ( πέλλα ), "stone", ( Heshychius ) which appears in some toponyms in Greece like Pella ( Πέλλα ), Pellene ( Πελλήνη ) Robert Beekes suggests that the word πέλλα has probably Pre-Greek origin. The Doric word apella ( ἀπέλλα ) originally meant wall, enclosure of stones, and later assembly of people within the limits of

130-474: A Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family. Most of the world's languages are known to be related to others. Those that have no known relatives (or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are called language isolates , essentially language families consisting of

195-473: A common epithet of Apollo as family-god is "Apollo Patroos". Ancient Macedonian language Ancient Macedonian was the language of the ancient Macedonians which was either a dialect of Ancient Greek or a separate Hellenic language . It was spoken in the kingdom of Macedonia during the 1st millennium BC and belonged to the Indo-European language family . It gradually fell out of use during

260-554: A consequence of the Macedonians' role in the formation of the Koine, Macedonian contributed considerable elements, unsurprisingly including some military terminology (διμοιρίτης, ταξίαρχος, ὑπασπισταί, etc.). Among the many contributions were the general use of the first declension grammar for male and female nouns with an -as ending, attested in the genitive of Macedonian coinage from the early 4th century BC of Amyntas III (ΑΜΥΝΤΑ in

325-429: A dialectal form of Greek. There are, however, a number of words that are not easily identifiable as Greek and reveal, for example, voiced stops where Greek shows voiceless aspirates. ⟨†⟩ marked words which have been corrupted. A number of Hesychius words are listed orphan; some of them have been proposed as Macedonian Among the references that have been discussed as possibly bearing some witness to

390-509: A linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar unique innovations in Germanic , Baltic and Slavic that are far more likely to be areal features than traceable to a common proto-language. But legitimate uncertainty about whether shared innovations are areal features, coincidence, or inheritance from a common ancestor, leads to disagreement over the proper subdivisions of any large language family. The concept of language families

455-426: A number of sign languages have developed in isolation and appear to have no relatives at all. Nonetheless, such cases are relatively rare and most well-attested languages can be unambiguously classified as belonging to one language family or another, even if this family's relation to other families is not known. Language contact can lead to the development of new languages from the mixture of two or more languages for

520-427: A single language and have no single ancestor. Isolates are languages that cannot be proven to be genealogically related to any other modern language. As a corollary, every language isolate also forms its own language family — a genetic family which happens to consist of just one language. One often cited example is Basque , which forms a language family on its own; but there are many other examples outside Europe. On

585-512: A single language. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can give wildly different numbers of languages within a certain family. Classifications of the Japonic family , for example, range from one language (a language isolate with dialects) to nearly twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within

650-462: A single language. There are an estimated 129 language isolates known today. An example is Basque . In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives or had relatives at some point in their history but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them. A language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship

715-601: A standard Greek unvoiced aspirate: κεβ(α)λή keb(a)lē versus κεφαλή kephalē ('head'). Emilio Crespo, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid , wrote that "the voicing of voiceless stops and the development of aspirates into voiced fricatives turns out to be the outcome of an internal development of Macedonian as a dialect of Greek" without excluding "the presence of interference from other languages or of any linguistic substrate or adstrate", as also argued by M. Hatzopoulos. A number of

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780-655: A vernacular local variety comes from onomastic evidence , ancient glossaries and recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia , such as the Pella curse tablet . This local variety is usually classified by scholars as a dialect of Northwest Doric Greek , and occasionally as an Aeolic Greek dialect or a distinct sister language of Greek . Due to the fragmentary attestation of this dialect or language, various interpretations are possible. Suggested classifications of ancient Macedonian include: Because of

845-487: Is a geographic area having several languages that feature common linguistic structures. The similarities between those languages are caused by language contact, not by chance or common origin, and are not recognized as criteria that define a language family. An example of a sprachbund would be the Indian subcontinent . Shared innovations, acquired by borrowing or other means, are not considered genetic and have no bearing with

910-455: Is a passage from Livy (lived 59 BC-14 AD) in his Ab urbe condita (31.29). Describing political negotiations between Macedonians and Aetolians in the late 3rd century BC, Livy has a Macedonian ambassador argue that Aetolians, Acarnanians and Macedonians were "men of the same language". This has been interpreted as referring to a shared North-West Greek speech (as opposed to Attic Koiné). In another passage, Livy states that an announcement

975-483: Is also a sister language to that fourth branch, then the two sister languages are more closely related to each other than to that common ancestral proto-language. The term macrofamily or superfamily is sometimes applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods. Some close-knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take

1040-597: Is also shared with Thessalian (e.g. Epitaph for Pyrrhiadas, Kierion ). M. Hatzopoulos and Johannes Engels summarize the Macedonian anthroponymy (that is names borne by people from Macedonia before the expansion beyond the Axios or people undoubtedly hailing from this area after the expansion) as follows: Common in the creation of ethnics is the use of -έστης, -εστός especially when derived from sigmatic nouns (ὄρος > Ὀρέστης but also Δῖον > Διασταί). Per Engels,

1105-452: Is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other modern language despite numerous attempts. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language , spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In

1170-410: Is an accepted version of this page A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree , or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy . Linguists thus describe

1235-543: Is based on the historical observation that languages develop dialects , which over time may diverge into distinct languages. However, linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than familiar biological ancestry, in which species do not crossbreed. It is more like the evolution of microbes, with extensive lateral gene transfer . Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact , which in extreme cases may lead to languages with no single ancestor, whether they be creoles or mixed languages . In addition,

1300-533: Is found with any other known language. A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Albanian and Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is usually clarified with a modifier . For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language

1365-460: Is no upper bound to the number of languages a family can contain. Some families, such as the Austronesian languages , contain over 1000. Language families can be identified from shared characteristics amongst languages. Sound changes are one of the strongest pieces of evidence that can be used to identify a genetic relationship because of their predictable and consistent nature, and through

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1430-637: Is not a measure of) a genetic relationship between the languages concerned. Linguistic interference can occur between languages that are genetically closely related, between languages that are distantly related (like English and French, which are distantly related Indo-European languages ) and between languages that have no genetic relationship. Some exceptions to the simple genetic relationship model of languages include language isolates and mixed , pidgin and creole languages . Mixed languages, pidgins and creole languages constitute special genetic types of languages. They do not descend linearly or directly from

1495-451: Is not attested by written records and so is conjectured to have been spoken before the invention of writing. A common visual representation of a language family is given by a genetic language tree. The tree model is sometimes termed a dendrogram or phylogeny . The family tree shows the relationship of the languages within a family, much as a family tree of an individual shows their relationship with their relatives. There are criticisms to

1560-446: Is part of the larger Indo-European family, which includes many other languages native to Europe and South Asia , all believed to have descended from a common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European . A language family is usually said to contain at least two languages, although language isolates — languages that are not related to any other language — are occasionally referred to as families that contain one language. Inversely, there

1625-422: Is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method , a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher . This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families in the list of language families . For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Indo-European

1690-884: Is related to Proto-Hellenic noun *gʷous , and hence to PIE noun *gʷṓws ('cattle'), this would indicate that the labiovelars were either intact, or merged with the velars, unlike the usual Greek treatment (Attic βοῦς boûs ). Such deviations, however, are not unknown in Greek dialects; compare Laconian Doric (the dialect of Sparta) γλεπ- glep- for common Greek βλεπ- blep- , as well as Doric γλάχων gláchōn and Ionic γλήχων glēchōn for common Greek βλήχων blēchōn . A number of examples suggest that voiced velar stops were devoiced, especially word-initially: κάναδοι kánadoi , 'jaws' (< PIE * genu- ); κόμβους kómbous , 'molars' (< PIE * gombh- ); within words: ἀρκόν arkón (Attic ἀργός argós );

1755-409: The Greek gods . Most of them combine a Macedonian dialectal form with a clear Greek etymology (e.g Δῐός from Zeus ; Περίτιος from Heracles Peritas (“Guardian”) ; Ξανδικός/Ξανθικός from Xanthos, “the blond” (probably a reference to Heracles); Άρτεμίσιος from Artemis etc.) with the possible exception of one, which is attested in other Greek calendars as well. According to Martin P. Nilsson ,

1820-465: The North Germanic language family, including Danish , Swedish , Norwegian and Icelandic , which have shared descent from Ancient Norse . Latin and ancient Norse are both attested in written records, as are many intermediate stages between those ancestral languages and their modern descendants. In other cases, genetic relationships between languages are not directly attested. For instance,

1885-674: The comparative method can be used to reconstruct proto-languages. However, languages can also change through language contact which can falsely suggest genetic relationships. For example, the Mongolic , Tungusic , and Turkic languages share a great deal of similarities that lead several scholars to believe they were related . These supposed relationships were later discovered to be derived through language contact and thus they are not truly related. Eventually though, high amounts of language contact and inconsistent changes will render it essentially impossible to derive any more relationships; even

1950-489: The comparative method of linguistic analysis. In order to test the hypothesis that two languages are related, the comparative method begins with the collection of pairs of words that are hypothesized to be cognates : i.e., words in related languages that are derived from the same word in the shared ancestral language. Pairs of words that have similar pronunciations and meanings in the two languages are often good candidates for hypothetical cognates. The researcher must rule out

2015-638: The daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related . The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with different regional dialects of the proto-language undergoing different language changes and thus becoming distinct languages over time. One well-known example of a language family is the Romance languages , including Spanish , French , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , Catalan , and many others, all of which are descended from Vulgar Latin . The Romance family itself

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2080-466: The 4th century BC bearing mostly names. About 99% of the roughly 6,300 inscriptions discovered by archaeologists within the confines of ancient Macedonia were written in the Greek language, using the Greek alphabet . The legends in all currently discovered coins also in Greek. The Pella curse tablet , a text written in a distinct Doric Greek dialect, found in 1986 and dated to between mid to early 4th century BC, has been forwarded as an argument that

2145-808: The 4th century BC, marginalized by the use of Attic Greek by the Macedonian aristocracy, the Ancient Greek dialect that became the basis of Koine Greek , the lingua franca of the Hellenistic period . It became extinct during either the Hellenistic or Roman imperial period, and was entirely replaced by Koine Greek. While the bulk of surviving public and private inscriptions found in ancient Macedonia were written in Attic Greek (and later in Koine Greek), fragmentary documentation of

2210-512: The Macedonian toponym Akesamenai , from the Pierian name Akesamenos (if Akesa- is cognate to Greek agassomai , agamai , "to astonish"; cf. the Thracian name Agassamenos ). In Aristophanes ' The Birds , the form κεβλήπυρις keblēpyris ('red head', the name of a bird, perhaps the goldfinch or redpoll) is found, showing a Macedonian-style voiced stop in place of

2275-400: The Macedonian calendar is formed like a regular Greek one and the names of the months attest the Greek nationality of the Macedonians. Macedonian onomastics: the earliest epigraphical documents attesting substantial numbers of Macedonian proper names are the second Athenian alliance decree with Perdiccas II (~417–413 BC), the decree of Kalindoia (~335–300 BC) and seven curse tablets of

2340-467: The Macedonian words, particularly in Hesychius of Alexandria ' lexicon, are disputed (i.e., some do not consider them actual Macedonian words) and some may have been corrupted in the transmission. Thus abroutes , may be read as abrouwes ( αβρουϝες ), with tau ( Τ ) replacing a digamma . If so, this word would perhaps be encompassable within a Greek dialect; however, others (e.g. A. Meillet ) see

2405-568: The Romance languages and the North Germanic languages are also related to each other, being subfamilies of the Indo-European language family , since both Latin and Old Norse are believed to be descended from an even more ancient language, Proto-Indo-European ; however, no direct evidence of Proto-Indo-European or its divergence into its descendant languages survives. In cases such as these, genetic relationships are established through use of

2470-440: The above material supports that Macedonian anthroponymy was predominantly Greek in character. The toponyms of Macedonia proper are generally Greek, though some of them show a particular phonology and a few others are non-Greek. The Macedonian calendar's origins go back to Greek prehistory . The names of the Macedonian months, just like most of the names of Greek months, are derived from feasts and related celebrations in honor of

2535-426: The access to civic rights. The three-day family-festival included initiation ceremonies, not concerning the state: The corresponding names for the offerings made were paideia (child), apellaia ( kouros ) and gamela (marriage, Greek: γάμος gamos ). It is almost sure that the fest belonged originally to Apollo , because his name is used in the oaths only near Poseidon Phratrios and Zeus Patroοs . In Athens

2600-557: The ancient Macedonian language was a dialect of North-Western Greek, part of the Doric dialect group. A body of idiomatic words has been assembled from ancient sources, mainly from coin inscriptions, and from the 5th century lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria , amounting to about 150 words and 200 proper names, though the number of considered words sometimes differs from scholar to scholar. The majority of these words can be confidently assigned to Greek albeit some words would appear to reflect

2665-496: The common ancestor of the Germanic subfamily, was itself a descendant of Proto-Indo-European , the common ancestor of the Indo-European family. Within a large family, subfamilies can be identified through "shared innovations": members of a subfamily will share features that represent retentions from their more recent common ancestor, but were not present in the overall proto-language of the larger family. Some taxonomists restrict

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2730-416: The dental as authentic and think that this specific word would perhaps belong to an Indo-European language different from Greek. A. Panayotou summarizes some features generally identified through ancient texts and epigraphy: Ancient Macedonian morphology is shared with ancient Epirus , including some of the oldest inscriptions from Dodona . The morphology of the first declension nouns with an -ας ending

2795-563: The family tree model. Critics focus mainly on the claim that the internal structure of the trees is subject to variation based on the criteria of classification. Even among those who support the family tree model, there are debates over which languages should be included in a language family. For example, within the dubious Altaic language family , there are debates over whether the Japonic and Koreanic languages should be included or not. The wave model has been proposed as an alternative to

2860-415: The family. The largest five language families in terms of number of speakers (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo and Austronesian) make up five-sixths (almost 83.3%) of the world’s population. Two languages have a genetic relationship , and belong to the same language family, if both are descended from a common ancestor through the process of language change , or one is descended from

2925-415: The family. Thus, the term family is analogous to the biological term clade . Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, sometimes referred to as "branches" or "subfamilies" of the family; for instance, the Germanic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European family. Subfamilies share a more recent common ancestor than the common ancestor of the larger family; Proto-Germanic ,

2990-495: The following families that contain at least 1% of the 7,164 known languages in the world: Glottolog 5.0 (2024) lists the following as the largest families, of 7,788 languages (other than sign languages , pidgins , and unclassifiable languages ): Language counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect; for example Lyle Campbell counts only 27 Otomanguean languages, although he, Ethnologue and Glottolog also disagree as to which languages belong in

3055-468: The form of dialect continua in which there are no clear-cut borders that make it possible to unequivocally identify, define, or count individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility between them, as occurs in Arabic , the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as

3120-473: The fragmentary sources of Ancient Macedonian, only a little is understood about the special features of the language. A notable sound-law is that the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates (/bʰ, dʰ, gʰ/) sometimes appear as voiced stops /b, d, g/, (written β, δ, γ ), whereas they were generally unvoiced as /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ ( φ, θ, χ ) elsewhere in Ancient Greek. If γοτάν gotán ('pig')

3185-596: The genitive; the Attic form that fell into disuse would be ΑΜΥΝΤΟΥ). There were changes in verb conjugation such as in the Imperative δέξα attested in Macedonian sling stones found in Asiatic battlefields, that became adopted in place of the Attic forms. Koine Greek established a spirantisation of beta, gamma and delta, which has been attributed to the Macedonian influence. Genetic relationship (linguistics) This

3250-503: The global scale, the site Glottolog counts a total of 423 language families in the world, including 184 isolates. One controversial theory concerning the genetic relationships among languages is monogenesis , the idea that all known languages, with the exceptions of creoles , pidgins and sign languages , are descendant from a single ancestral language. If that is true, it would mean all languages (other than pidgins, creoles, and sign languages) are genetically related, but in many cases,

3315-542: The language family concept. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages ( Latin , Oscan , Umbrian , etc.) might well be " areal features ". However, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, since English and continental West Germanic were not

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3380-444: The latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family. A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language (not to be confused with a mother tongue ) being the root from which all languages in the family stem. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it

3445-794: The linguistic situation in Macedonia, there is a sentence from a fragmentary dialogue, apparently between an Athenian and a Macedonian, in an extant fragment of the 5th century BC comedy 'Macedonians' by the Athenian poet Strattis (fr. 28), where a stranger is portrayed as speaking in a rural Greek dialect. His language contains expressions such as ὕμμες ὡττικοί for ὑμεὶς ἀττικοί "you Athenians", ὕμμες being also attested in Homer , Sappho ( Lesbian ) and Theocritus ( Doric ), while ὡττικοί appears only in "funny country bumpkin" contexts of Attic comedy. Another text that has been quoted as evidence

3510-791: The offerings made at the initiation of the young men at a meeting of a family group. Apellaion is the offering of a part of the hair to the god, and corresponds to the Koureion of the Apaturia . Apellaios is the month of these rites, and Apellon is the "megistos kouros" (the great Kouros). There is evidence for this festival in Epidauros , Olous , Kalchedon , "Heracleia" at Siris , Tauromenion , Chaleion , Lamia , Oeta ( Oἳτη ( Oetē )), Tolophon , Delphi and also in Ancient Macedonia . The phratry (‘brotherhood’) controlled

3575-423: The oldest demonstrable language family, Afroasiatic , is far younger than language itself. Estimates of the number of language families in the world may vary widely. According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families, including isolates. Ethnologue 27 (2024) lists

3640-454: The other. The term and the process of language evolution are independent of, and not reliant on, the terminology, understanding, and theories related to genetics in the biological sense, so, to avoid confusion, some linguists prefer the term genealogical relationship . There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of

3705-470: The possibility that the two words are similar merely due to chance, or due to one having borrowed the words from the other (or from a language related to the other). Chance resemblance is ruled out by the existence of large collections of pairs of words between the two languages showing similar patterns of phonetic similarity. Once coincidental similarity and borrowing have been eliminated as possible explanations for similarities in sound and meaning of words,

3770-653: The purposes of interactions between two groups who speak different languages. Languages that arise in order for two groups to communicate with each other to engage in commercial trade or that appeared as a result of colonialism are called pidgin . Pidgins are an example of linguistic and cultural expansion caused by language contact. However, language contact can also lead to cultural divisions. In some cases, two different language speaking groups can feel territorial towards their language and do not want any changes to be made to it. This causes language boundaries and groups in contact are not willing to make any compromises to accommodate

3835-536: The putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically (by ancestry) as opposed to horizontally (by spatial diffusion). In some cases, the shared derivation of a group of related languages from a common ancestor is directly attested in the historical record. For example, this is the case for the Romance language family , wherein Spanish , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , and French are all descended from Latin, as well as for

3900-413: The relationships may be too remote to be detectable. Alternative explanations for some basic observed commonalities between languages include developmental theories, related to the biological development of the capacity for language as the child grows from newborn. A language family is a monophyletic unit; all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all descendants of that ancestor are included in

3965-570: The remaining explanation is common origin: it is inferred that the similarities occurred due to descent from a common ancestor, and the words are actually cognates, implying the languages must be related. When languages are in contact with one another , either of them may influence the other through linguistic interference such as borrowing. For example, French has influenced English , Arabic has influenced Persian , Sanskrit has influenced Tamil , and Chinese has influenced Japanese in this way. However, such influence does not constitute (and

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4030-416: The square . The word usually appears in plural. Robert Beekes derives the word from the verb ἀπέλλειν , ἀποκλείειν ("shut off from or out from") therefore apella is the "enclosed space, meeting space". When a pubescent was received into the body of grown men, as a grown Kouros (male youth) he became ἀπελλάξ ( apellax , "sharer in secret rites") and he could enter the apellai . The apellaia were

4095-426: The term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus on how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups , and groups into complexes . A top-level (i.e., the largest) family is often called a phylum or stock . The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related. This means if a branch of a proto-language is four branches down and there

4160-502: The tree model. The wave model uses isoglosses to group language varieties; unlike in the tree model, these groups can overlap. While the tree model implies a lack of contact between languages after derivation from an ancestral form, the wave model emphasizes the relationship between languages that remain in contact, which is more realistic. Historical glottometry is an application of the wave model, meant to identify and evaluate genetic relations in linguistic linkages . A sprachbund

4225-488: Was translated from Latin to Greek for Macedonians to understand. Quintus Curtius Rufus , Philotas 's trial and the statement that the Greek-speaking Branchidae had common language with the Macedonians. Over time, "Macedonian" (μακεδονικός), when referring to language (and related expressions such as μακεδονίζειν ; to speak in the Macedonian fashion) acquired the meaning of Koine Greek . As

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