FYROM Claim:

Quote:

Fact: Greek was not the “lingua franca” during the reign of Philip II and Alexander III. In fact, it became so later because of the conquests of Alexander and the many colonies he founded that dispersed the Greek culture and language around the world of Eastern Mediterranean. During the time of Philip and the beginning of the conquests of Alexander, if there was a lingua franca, that was Persian, not Greek. In fact, after Alexander, despite the wide adoption of Greek, native languages survived and thrived and Hellenistic kingdoms erected multiple multilingual inscriptions.

To demonstrate it clearly…

Prior to Philip and Alexander,

Did Illyrians speak Greek??? NO

Did Paeonians speak Greek? NO

Did Persians speak Greek? NO

Did Egyptians speak Greek? NO

Did the bulk of Thracians speak Greek? NO

Did the Carthaginians speak Greek? NO

Did the Romans speak Greek? NO

Did Dardanians speak Greek? NO

Did Indians speak Greek? NO

Did Macedonians speak Greek? YES

From all the multilingual inscriptions found, none contained the “phantom Macedonian language”. Extennsive escavations in Macedonia in hundreds of sites, private cemeteries, religious temples have not uncovered any other language than Greek and in fact, they established the fact that the Macedonian dialect was a North-West Greek dialect.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Ancient Macedonian History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.