Misplaced Pages

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Greek Macedonia (language, people)

There seem to be two gaps.

1. the Greek people who live in Macedonia. How should they be referred to, and does it depend on context?
2. and the variety of Greek spoken by Greek people who live in Macedonia. Have you thought about that? Is the language variety distinctive? I recall editors claiming that there is at least some difference in pronunciation. True? At the level that we should note?

Jd2718 (talk) 15:15, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. I don't really think these two items require much extra trouble. Their importance for our disambiguation practices has often been over-stated by interested parties in the debate. Truth is, for normal article writing purposes we have very few occasions for ever explicitly referring to either of these. Neither of them has a (legitimate) Misplaced Pages article: for the simple reason that nobody ever found anything worthwhile to write about them. There have been numerous attempts at creating such articles (one is currently at AfD). But it was all for the sole purpose of having a pretext to link to them and thereby "outbalance" the corresponding links to the Slavic items, or for proving the point that the latter must carry some extra disambiguation burden, not because the articles themselves contained anything of interest.

The inhabitants of Greek Macedonia are simply that: Greek Macedonians, Macedonian Greeks, people from Greek Macedonia. How often do we need to talk about them? How often do we mention Euboeans, Thrakiots, Thessalians or Peloponesians? Or, for that matter, Oregoneans, Floridans, Swabians, Yorkshireans, or Bourgogneans? Note that in these "but-there's-also-the-Greek-Macedonians" debates, there's sometimes something fishy going on about the definition of this group. Are we talking about just all inhabitants of Greek Macedonia? Or are we claiming that "Macedonian" can refer specifically and exclusively to ethnic Greeks from the region, to the exclusion of the local ethnic minorities (including the "other" Macedonians)? Greek editors sometimes seem to think in terms of such an emphatically Greek notion of "being a Macedonian", but I would contend that a group defined like that is simply never an object of the English language, and certainly not known under that name. "Macedonian" alone, in English, means either ethnic Macedonians, or all inhabitants of the region independent of ethnic affiliation. Never only and exclusively Greeks.

As for the dialect, there is a passing mention of it in varieties of Modern Greek, and that's about as much as we need. It's "the Macedonian dialects of modern Greek", or, in a context where Greek dialectology is already clearly established as the topic, simply "Macedonian". We don't have much to say about it. It's not highly distinctive among the general field of "northern" varieties. Northern Greece is apparently relatively homogeneous internally, and whatever people perceive of as characteristic of Macedonian speech seems in reality to be shared with a larger group of neighbouring varieties, and can thus be better described in a larger framework such as a general dialects article.

Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:45, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Quite reasonable. Did I indicate my general approval of your essay? I should have. Very nice job, thank you. Jd2718 (talk) 16:07, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

geographic region

This essay doesn't directly address naming the region. Either an odd turn of phrase: Macedonia is a republic in wider geographic region of Macedonia or disambiguation: Macedonia (geographic region) stretches from the Aegean Sea in the south... Would those do the trick, consistent with this essay? Jd2718 (talk) 18:00, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I thought I had covered that somewhere, lemme see: section "Referring to the wider historical area". Does that work for you? Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:25, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

The word "historical" throws me off a little. But I was wondering if your intent was to cover the geographic region. Did you mean just articles about old stuff? Jd2718 (talk) 19:06, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Ah, no, we can exchange "historical" with "geographical" if you prefer. I felt it came down more or less to the same thing. Actually, most contexts where one would legitimately talk about the wider region is in fact in historical (19th-early 20th century) contexts, in my experience at least. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:12, 18 April 2009 (UTC)