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1. : of, relating to, or written in a simplified form of the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing. 2. : popular, common. demotic idiom. 3. : of or relating to the form of Modern Greek that is based on everyday speech. Did you know? You may recognize the root of demotic from words like democracy and demography.
Demotic (from Ancient Greek: δημοτικός dēmotikós, 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts.
in or relating to a form of language used by ordinary people, that includes informal expressions and slang: He has made poetry out of demotic speech. She addressed us in demotic French. We are writing for a very diverse population, so our language must be more demotic.
Demotic script, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing of cursive form that was used in handwritten texts from the early 7th century bce until the 5th century ce. Demotic script derived from the earlier pictographic hieroglyphic inscriptions and the cursive hieratic script, and it began to replace hieratic.
The discovery, in 1799, of the Rosetta Stone, a bilingual text in Greek and the Egyptian Hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts enabled scholars such as Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Åkerblad and Thomas Young to make real progress with their decipherment efforts, and by the 1820s Jean-François Champollion had made the complete decipherment of the ...
Demotic, a truly “popular” script, was born and began to evolve swiftly. Egyptians themselves soon called this new script the sekh shat, or “documentary script.” The term “Demotic” was coined by Greek historian Herodotus, who introduced readers to the variety of scripts he encountered in fifth-century BCE Egypt:
The Demotic or popular script, a name given to it by Herodotus, developed from a northern variant of the Hieratic script in around 660 BC. The Egyptians themselves called it 'sekh shat' (writing for documents).
Demotic appears to have started in the Delta region, where the royal family of the 26th dynasty originated. Under the Saite administration, it became the standard for documents countrywide, relegating hieratic script for the most part to non-documentary texts.
A demotic saying or expression is casual, colloquial, and used by the masses. Some forms of the Greek and Egyptian languages are also called demotic, which will be relevant to you when you get your PhD in Classics.
The Egyptian cursive script, called hieratic writing, received its name from the Greek hieratikos (“priestly”) at a time during the late period when the script was used only for sacred texts, whereas everyday secular documents were written in another style, the demotic script (from Greek dēmotikos, “for the people” or “in common use”).
