time of trials. The poet Kostis Palamas later wrote that Politis' folklore studies had revealed "the fragmented face of the national soul under the masks that [changing] times have forced it to wear". It was around this time that folk-songs gradually ceased to be called tragoudia ethnika (national songs) and became known as dimotika tragoudia (demotic songs), explicitly linking the survival of the 'national soul' with demotic, and not with Katharevousa. Greek thinkers were also learning from the national unification movements in Italy and Germany. Inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder and perfected by the Brothers Grimm, the combination of folklore studies with scientific linguistics had proved highly effective in demonstrating German cultural continuity. The same combination would soon be put to work in Greece. Developments in linguistics Linguistics had made considerable advances in the half-century since Korais' time. The decipherment of ancient writing systems, the publication of Grimm's Law of sound-changes in 1822, Bopp's tracing of the inter-relationships of the Indo-European languages, Diez's work on the development of the Romance languages from Vulgar Latin, Schleicher's demonstration of an evolutionary tree of languages, and finally the announcement of Verner's Law in 1875, had all made it clear that the changes a language undergoes as time passes are not simply accumulations of random damage, like copying errors in a manuscript. Instead, the sound-changes are usually exceptionless and other developments often highly systematic. It had become evident that in the long term languages are constantly evolving like living things, rather than simply deteriorating from some perfect state established in a past age. This threw a very different light on the relationship between demotic and Ancient Greek. This Neogrammarian school of thought also regarded speech, rather than writing, as the essential root of language; as a rule it is the spoken language that naturally takes the lead in evolution, with written versions following later or not at all. These insights helped to explain why the trickle-down of 'pure' grammatical forms in the opposite, 'unnatural' direction—from written Katharevousa to spoken demotic—had been so disappointingly unsuccessful. In addition, the Neogrammarians drew attention to the way in which speakers constantly and instinctively adjust their speech to the usage they hear around them, thus maintaining the coherence and internal consistency of their spoken language across all its speakers at any given time (and keeping the sound-changes exceptionless). This means that spoken languages feel a natural everyday pressure towards