internal consistency that written (but un-spoken) languages do not. This too threw some light on the failure of Katharevousa to reach a stable consensus grammar over the two generations since its adoption. This was the intellectual ground on which the two pre-eminent Greek linguists of the new generation, Hatzidakis and Ioannis Psycharis, would battle for the next few decades: Hatzidakis as the defender of Katharevousa, and Psycharis as the champion of demotic. 1880–88 Demotic renaissance The Generation of 1880: poetry turns to demotic The literary 'Generation of 1880', also called the New Athenian School, made their debut with the publication in 1880 of the first collections of poetry from Georgios Drossinis and . In contrast to the First Athenian School poetry of Soutsos and his contemporaries, who had used increasingly archaic Katharevousa, the new work was largely in demotic; and the poems of Drossinis' next collection, Idylls (1884), are almost all on themes from folklore, informed by the laografia work of his friend Politis. However, the leading figure of the Generation of 1880 was to be Drossinis' and Kampas' close friend Kostis Palamas, who published his first collection of poems, The Songs of my Homeland, in 1886. All of these were in demotic. Palamas went on to win the national Filadelfeios poetry prize in 1889, and again in 1890, with more works in demotic. Within little more than a decade, Katharevousa had been supplanted by demotic as the preferred language of Athenian poetry. The press were quick to realize this. Already in 1880 a number of journals (including the prestigious family magazine Estia and the newspaper Akropolis) had opened their pages to poetry in demotic; and from 1889 onwards, under the editorship of successive New Athenians, Estia became a strong supporter of the demotic movement. Dissatisfaction with Katharevousa in prose fiction Although poetry was being taken over by demotic, prose fiction in the 1880s remained almost entirely Katharevousa. The three leading fiction writers of the time, Alexandros Papadiamantis, Georgios Vizyinos and Emmanouil Roïdis, were masters of Katharevousa style. But although non-fiction could be entirely Katharevousa (and in fact largely remained so for many years to come), fiction needed some demotic, if only for realistic dialogue, and the three writers handled this in different ways. Papadiamantis became famous for interweaving Katharevousa narration of an almost liturgical style with interior reflections and reminiscences in demotic, and with dialogue in local dialect. In