Demotic Greek

Demotic Greek differs in a few ways from Ancient Greek and from subsequent learned forms of Greek. Syntactically, it favours parataxis over subordination. It also heavily employs redundancy, such as (small little-girl) and (he-went-back-to-sleep again). Demotic also employs the diminutive with great frequency, The indirect object is usually expressed by prepending the word to the accusative or genitive (especially with regard to means or instrument). Bare is used without the article to express an indefinite duration of time, or contracted with the definite article for definiteness (especially with regard to place where or motion toward). By contrast, Katharevousa continued to employ the older in place of . The verb system inherited from Ancient Greek gradually evolved. The perfect, pluperfect, future perfect, and past conditional tenses were gradually replaced with conjugated forms of the verb (I have). The future tense and the subjunctive and optative moods, and eventually the infinitive, were replaced by the modal/tense auxiliaries and used with either the simplified or fused future/subjunctive forms. In contrast to this, Katharevousa employed older perfective forms and infinitives that had been mostly lost in the spoken language. However, Katharevousa did sometimes employ the same aorist or perfective forms as the spoken language, but preferred an archaizing form of the present indicative, e.g. for Demotic (I hide), which both have the same aorist form . Demotic Greek also borrowed a significant number of words from other languages, including Italian and Turkish, something which Katharevousa avoided. ==Demotic and Modern Greek==

Demotic as "Standard Modern Greek" Demotic is commonly used interchangeably with "Standard Modern Greek" (''''). Nonetheless, these terms are not necessarily synonyms. While today's Standard Modern Greek is fundamentally a continuation of earlier Demotic, it also contains—especially in its written form and formal registers—numerous words, grammatical forms, and phonetical features that did not exist in the most "pure" and consistent forms of Demotic during the period of diglossia in Greece. Due to these admixtures, it could even be described as a product of a "merger" between earlier Demotic and Katharevousa. Special dative forms: • (thank God) • (in the name [of] ...) • (in cash) • (following) • (meanwhile) • (in ignorance [of]) • (moreover) • (working, literally on the deed) • (percent, literally in a hundred) • (''with [one's] own hands'') Grammatical (morphological) features • Adjectives ending in , , (e.g. interesting) or in , , (e.g. thoughtful) - mostly in written language. • Declinable aorist participle, e.g. (having delivered), ([having been] born) - mostly in written language. • Reduplication in the perfect. E.g. (invited), (obsolete) Phonological features Modern Greek features many letter combinations that were avoided in traditional Demotic: • (e.g. "misdemeanor"); Demotic preferred (e.g. "to err; to be guilty") • (e.g. "building, structure"); Demotic preferred [e.g. "(stone)mason"] • (e.g. "falsity, lie"); Demotic preferred (e.g. "liar") • (e.g. / "I was sufficed / satisfied"); Demotic preferred (e.g. ) • (e.g. "yesterday"); Demotic preferred [e.g. ] • etc. Native Greek speakers, depending upon their level of education, may often make mistakes in these "educated" aspects of their language; one can often see mistakes like instead of (''I've been promoted), instead of (), instead of (the interesting person), instead of (the interesting women), instead of (the vote''). ==Radical demoticism==

One of the most radical proponents of a language that was to be cleansed of all "educated" elements was Giannis Psycharis, who lived in France and gained fame through his work My Voyage ('''', 1888). Not only did Psycharis propagate the exclusive use of the naturally grown colloquial language, but he actually opted for simplifying the morphology of Katharevousa forms prescription. For instance, Psycharis proposed changing the form of the neuter noun "light" ' (gen. ') into ' (gen. '). Such radical forms had occasional precedent in Renaissance attempts to write in Demotic, and reflected Psycharis' linguistic training as a Neogrammarian, mistrusting the possibility of exceptions in linguistic evolution. Moreover, Psycharis also advocated spelling reform, which would have meant abolishing most of the six different ways to write the vowel /i/ and all instances of double consonants. Therefore, he wrote his own name as , instead of . As written and spoken Demotic became standardized over the next few decades, many compromises were made with Katharevousa (as is reflected in contemporary standard Greek) despite the loud objections of Psycharis and the radical "psycharist" () camp within the proponents of Demotic's use. Eventually these ideas of radical demoticism were largely marginalized and when a standardized Demotic was made the official language of the Greek state in 1976, the legislation stated that it would be used "without dialectal and extremist forms"—an explicit rejection of Psycharis' ideals. ==References==