Ancient Macedonian dialect

Properties

Hatzopoulos supports the hypothesis of a (North-)'Achaean' substratum extending as far north as the head of the Thermaic Gulf, which had a continuous relation, in prehistoric times, both in Thessaly and Macedonia, with the Northwest Greek-speaking populations living on the other side of the Pindus mountain range, and contacts became cohabitation when the Argead Macedonians completed their wandering from Orestis to Lower Macedonia in the 7th c. BC. According to this hypothesis, Hatzopoulos concludes that the Ancient Macedonian dialect of the historical period, attested in inscriptions such as Pella curse tablet, is a sort of koine resulting from the interaction and the influences of various elements, the most important of which are the North-Achaean substratum, the Northwest Greek dialect of the Argead Macedonians, and the Thracian and Phrygian adstrata. Claude Brixhe espoused the hypothesis "of a sporadic secondary voicing of unvoiced consonants within the history of Greek", in agreement with Hatzopoulos.