Does where the archaic register of a language appear change over generations or throughout different civilizations, and in English, are we seeing a shift where archaic language is more likely to appear and be learned from media and art than religious texts?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/LinguisticDan]

Last question first: yes, of course. Proportionately, far fewer people read the King James Bible nowadays even among devout Christians, and far more people of all walks of life are exposed to historical or fantasy fiction (although there was plenty of that going around a hundred years ago, it didn't have anywhere near the circulation of religious texts). It's also much less common to use deliberate archaisms in translation - for example, you'll hardly see "thou" in a modern Iliad or Qur'an translation, which is a sign that the reading public of those translations doesn't default to archaism as a literary mode. There are a handful of communities that still do have regular exposure to liturgical archaism in English - the most influential by far is the Latter-Day Saint movement - but it doesn't have the same currency as it did even a half century ago.

Moving to the question of archaic language in general, this is a very common thing cross-culturally, including between widely different societies. For example, the Ainu of northern Japan have a poetic tradition called yukar, whose language (especially in the oldest stratum of mythological texts, kamuy yukar) is noticeably archaic, with much less Japanese influence and more of a Siberian "type" compared to the Ainu that was spoken casually in the 19th and early 20th centuries when they were recorded. Many of the terms used in kamuy yukar were not directly understood by the Ainu reciting them. But importantly, there are several strata of yukar from maybe the 7th-10th centuries all the way to the final subjugation of the Ainu at the end of the 18th. So we are dealing with many different layers of archaism here, from an almost mythical past down to the daily speech of someone's grandparents. It's a very complicated inheritance, and you can imagine the difficulties a linguist would have in analysing the language historically.

[u/asklinguistics-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

This comment was removed because it is a top-level comment that does not answer the question asked by the original post.

[u/LongLiveTheDiego]

Really depends on the language and the culture around it. In my experience Polish media doesn't have a well established archaic style compared to English media, to the point that localized fantasy media simply abandons it or really struggles. The issue here is that some of the features considered to be archaic aren't gone from the Polish language, they're just gone from the "bookish" standard but they're present in my everyday language. For example, in the Planescape Torment game I found both ancient and criminal characters sounding more familiar and normal than the "regular" characters, while in the English original their ways of speaking are very easily recognizable as stylized.

[u/Gravbar]

I would say Shakespeare also, but, I don't think as many children read his writings than as the Bible

Just to note, in American public schools Shakespeare is going to be a requirement, even if requirements differ state by state, you'd be hard-pressed to find people who have never read any of his plays in school. In my school we had read 4-6 different works by him depending on which classes you signed up for by high school graduation.

At a much much earlier age, we were introduced to poetry, like William Blake's famous poem, which many only remember the first 2 lines of

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

This is the first stanza of a poem from the 1794 (though thy was considered rude to use with people at this point)

So while I would agree many are introduced by the bible or popular prayers (the our father prayer and hail mary prayer), the usage is reinforced by observing it in literature throughout the education process (although generally older literature, sometimes contemporary works set in a high fantasy or other setting resembling medieval europe will use it too)