Tocharian and Macedonian

[Larry Trask]

Pete Gray writes:

>  Inspired by Lloyd to ask odd questions, I dare to wonder if there is any
>  connection between Tocharian and Macedonian -or is our evidence for
>  Macedonian too weak?

Too weak.

Peter Schrijver summarizes the position as follows in Glanville Price's
Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe:

Our knowledge of Macedonian is extremely fragmentary: place-names, personal
names, and a few nouns surviving as glosses in Greek sources.  These have
given rise to hot and often politically inspired debates concerning its
linguistic affiliation, which are far from settled.  The sources can be
divided into three categories: (1) Greek words and names; some of these are
Attic and were undoubtedly borrowed (Attic Greek was the official language
of the court of the Macedonian kings); others are not Attic but show
possible resemblances to northern Greek dialects; (2) words which have
Greek (and sometimes wider Indo-European) cognates but whose sound
structure differs markedly from any known Greek dialect (e.g., <danos>
'death', Greek <thanatos>); (3) words which have no known Greek cognates
and usually no convincing Indo-European etymology (e.g., <bedu> 'air').

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk