 The origins of the definition of an ethnic Slav Macedonian identity arose from the writings of Georgi Pulevski in the 1870s and 1880s, who identified the existence of a distinct modern "Slavic Macedonian" language that he defined as different from the other languages in that it had linguistic elements from Serbian, Bulgarian, Church Slavonic, and Albanian.Pulevski analyzed the folk histories of the Slavic Macedonian people, in which he concluded that Slavic Macedonians were ethnically linked to the people of the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia of Philip and Alexander the Great based on the claim that the ancient Macedonian language had Slavic components in it and thus the ancient Macedonians were Slavic, and modern-day Slavic Macedonians were their descendants.However, Slavic Macedonians' self-identification and nationalist loyalties remained ambiguous in the late 19th century.