We would not be far off in thinking of the
demotic phase of language as a product of the Renaissance, Reformation, and scientific revolution (GC 13), at least in so far as it becomes culturally dominant over the other forms--as the term
demotic (from the Greek, people) implies, it has always been used at a basic, concrete, everyday level.
Mawby's analysis of authoritarianism misses the point that it was impossible to achieve "
demotic power" by dividing the working classes along lines of ethnicity, gender, party politics, and labor unionism.
It was Young, in particular, who made considerable progress in deciphering the
Demotic text, identified the hieroglyphic cartouches as containing the names of the Ptolemaic rulers, and tentatively identified a selection of alphabetic signs and words in the hieroglyphic inscription.
Gish's chapter, that begins with an excerpt of her 2009 interview with Liz Lochhead and Margery Palmer McCulloch and builds upon it a comprehensive discussion of Lochhead's creative use of
demotic and false Scots, somewhat reflective of Hagemann's earlier research into a variety of uses of
demotic Scots in drama.
This unique artefact features a royal decree from Pharaoh Ptolemy V (196 BC) written in three texts: ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs,
Demotic and Ancient Greek.
A second chapter concentrates on
demotic language and Skelton's use of the opaque and seemingly nonsensical, especially in his poems in the Skeltonic metre, and a third explores his inventive capacity for using odd personae and quasi-dramatic scenes involving colloquial language.
Especially memorable are the very Rublevian yet 15th-century Hospitality of Abraham, the emotional dynamics of the 1690 Embrace of St Peter and Paul, and the powerfully
demotic work of the early 18th-century Dionysios of Fourna.
What most of us are unfamiliar with is the later and specialised work in Egyptology, specifically in
demotic studies that deal with native script and culture of the late little-known Saite period, the twenty-sixth dynasty (624 to 525 BCE) up to and including the Roman period.
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt's Western Delta in 1799 led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphic script by Jean-Francois Champollion since the three scripts on the stone, in hieroglyphic,
demotic and Greek, conveyed the same information.
The interview opens with a few questions concerning television studies, as I recently read Turner's (2010) Ordinary People and the Media: The
Demotic Turn.
Ellen Kaufman's pantoum "These Lines are Beams of Light" is written in a flowing conversational style that avoids the end-stopped lines typical of the form in favor of one that captures the sustained momentum of unfolding thought, and yet the artifice is foregrounded both by the poem's language (the colloquial and
demotic "vice versa" and "White-Out" for instance), and in its concerns: "And what would they love/if they could, our words?
Lichtheim, Late Egyptian wisdom literature in the international context: A study of
Demotic instructions.
Of great help to archaeologists, the message had been chiseled in three different scripts: Greek,
Demotic Egyptian (a language used in Ptolemy's day for everyday communications and records) and hieroglyphs (most often seen on temples and used for sacred texts).
We remain in the
demotic 'devastated' and 'gutted' when affected but above all, bereft of less threadbare adverbs to express our anger and powerlessness as victims..
Demotic is the modern spoken form of which European language?