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Glite Dictionary
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Popular or everyday 🇬🇷 Modern Greek
demotic

demotic

9.9
The everyday spoken form of modern Greek used instead of formal written Greek
  • adjective
  • /dɪˈmɒtɪk/
  • Specialized
translation icon : demótico
  • It's exactly the same a version in that's a demotic, vulgar version of the great situation of what has happened to Ulysses.

Examples

  • Roth would praise its script as "poeticized vernacular" and the "high demotic poetry that was the liturgy of World War II."

    Academic text (2011)

  • The solution at that time seemed to involve a dramatic stylistic downshifting, achieved primarily through recourse to the demotic on a lexical level, and through multiplication of characters and points of view on a structural level.

    Academic text (2007)

  • In modern Greece, most people speak a demotic form of the language in their daily conversations.

  • Her novel is written in a demotic style that reflects the way people actually talk.

  • When discussing Greek literature, it is important to recognize the influence of demotic language on contemporary works.

Compounds

Demotic language
9.9

Most people use the everyday form of Greek when they speak and write

Demotic script
  • Specialized
9.9

A simple handwritten Egyptian writing used for everyday documents in ancient Egypt

Surface Forms

demotic positive

Morphology

demotic = demo (semi-transparent) = demo + ic

Built from the combining form demo- ('people') + '-ic'; the relation to 'people' is clear, but the specific technical sense referring to a particular register of modern Greek is specialized and not fully derivable by a typical learner.

Etymology

Demotic comes from the Greek demos, which means 'the people' and is the same root as democracy. It was used for the everyday Greek that ordinary people spoke, so demotic Greek is the common, spoken form rather than the formal literary style.