The study of Macedonian historical phonology as an independent discipline is a quite new field, as are Macedonian studies in general. It was only after the Second World War, i.e. after the creation of the Macedonian republic within the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia, that Macedonian was recognized as a national language and its literary form could thus be codified in 1945. Various fields have developed in the last three decades in the area of Macedonian, and the study of its history is one such field. After the publication of several specialized studies, the first synthesis of Macedonian historical phonology appeared in 1965 in my Istorija na makedonskiot jazik. That text has served as the basis of the present work, although there are significant differences in a number of matters. These differences are reflected not only in the range of the material and the organization of the text, but also in the solutions to a number of specific problems and in an approach which comes as close as possible to defining the chronology of the phenomena and thus to the investigation, from a phonological viewpoint, of the formation of Macedonian dialects. The fact that Macedonian historical phonology is new as an independent discipline does not mean that this field has not been studied in the past. On the contrary, quite a bit of work has been done and without it our own undertaking, under today's changed historical circumstances, would be much more difficult. The interest in Macedonian within Slavic studies was first aroused during the time of J. Dobrovsky' (1753-1829), when it was expected that a better knowledge of the Macedonian linguistic situation would contribute to the history of Old Church Slavic in view of the fact that it was based on a 9th century Southern Macedonian dialect. Thus the description of the oldest texts of Macedonian origin (see § 8) and the description of the modern Macedonian dialects were aimed at a single goal. During the course of the last century, the closer study of Old Church Slavic texts gradually confirmed the belief that there were regional variants even in the early period. Toward the end of the 9th and during the 10th century, certain linguistic features distinguished the Moravian variant, as well as the Macedonian and Bulgarian variants. These liguistic features, among other things, serve to distinguish the Preslav and Ohrid schools of the oldest period of Church Slavonic literature. The Macedonian (Ohrid) recension is characterized by greater archaism, i.e. by a more consistent continuation of the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition. Thus, for example, there is no iotation (word or syllable initially), 5 is preserved, and on the morphological level there are archaic forms such as the past part act I of the type mol'b 'pray' and the aor of the type rek', re'h' 'say' l sg. The lexical differences between the Ohrid and Preslav schools are well known from the major works of V. Jagic. There were also some innovations which gradually intruded and became the norm in Macedonian territory, and which even spread further. Along with all this, we must keep in mind the significant fact that the Glagolitic alphabet was preserved in the Macedonian recension for a long time, through the 11th century. Of course, this cannot be taken as its decisive distinguishing characteristic, but it is significant in the given historical situation, since the Bulgarian recension was dominated by Cyrillic from the very beginning. However, the recensions of a literary language constitute an open compilation of features which is frequently valid only in a statistical and relative sense, with possibilities for both divergent and convergent development depending on historical circumstances.

The interest in the study of Old Church Slavic contributed much to calling the attention of Slavicists to Macedonian dialects. It was expected that these would provide data in support of the hypothesis of the Macedonian origin of the oldest Slavic literary language. The work of the Slovene Slavicist Vatroslav Oblak (1864-1896) is worthy of note. With the above mentioned expectation in mind, he collected valuable dialectological material in Salonica and the Salonica region from November 1891 to March 1892, and it was published posthumously in his book Macedonische Studien (Vienna, 1896). In our own century, there are the extremely significant studies by A. Macedonian Selishchev, A. Mazon, A. Vaillant, A. Belic, Macedonian Malecki, et al. These works, like that of Oblak, are not just descriptions of the given dialects, but also contain rich historical commentary, especially in the field of phonology. The general interests ol Slavic studies in the past contributed to the exploration of a great many questions connected with Macedonian historical phonology, but this did not lead to its development as a separate discipline. In the neighboring Slavic lands, which have laid claims to Macedonia, there has also been a narrower, political interest which has served as a strong stimulus to the study of Macedonian Many dialectological and historical studies attempting to prove that the Macedonian dialects belong to the Serbian or Bulgarian languages have appeared. Also, Macedonian material has been included regularly in general historical studies, especially in Bulgaria. Regardless of the given historical viewpoint, however, even these works often contain results which can be included constructively in an historical phonology of Macedonian The material we have presented shows delimited scholarly activity covering a rather long period in which there has been not only a shift of basic interest, but also a change in scholarly approach. After the primacy of the philological approach at the beginning of the last century, the neo-grammarian school held supreme authority through the first few decades of the 20th century. Finally, in the years after World War Two, there has been a gradual but ever increasing tendency toward a phonematic structuralist approach.

This text was taken from Blazhe Koneski's A Historical Phonology Of the Macedonian Language, Carl Winter Universitaetsverlag Heidelberg, 1983, for fair use only.

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Last Modified: September 23, 1996

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