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Archaic words are making a comeback, thanks to hipsters' love of all things old. The Washington Post's wonkblog has an article examining how hipsters may be bringing back vintage language, and the effects it is having on modern culture. This may be a passing fad, as hipsters themselves are now making jokes about bespoke water; if they're not careful the charming anachronism may go mainstream and become unfit for hipster irony.
BTW, this submission was inspired by a comment thread here about craft/artisanal beers. Apparently, the old words are not just re-entering the hipsters' language but getting co-opted by marketers hoping to woo the hipster pocketbook. Some linguistic shift may result.
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How Hipsters May be Bringing Back Vintage Language
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There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:08AM
I wouldn't call Proto-Indo-European a "made up" language. It's based on some hard linguistic evidence of consonant changes, vowel shifts, and various other patterns that are known to have occurred. Sure, the linguists don't know just how correct they are because there is no written evidence of any Indo-European language that old. However, we do have written evidence of a very old, very archaic language that is still spoken today: Greek. Written Greek (in the form of Linear B) goes back about 3500 years and we know with certainty how it was pronounced 2700 years ago. Furthermore, while Greek pronunciation has changed over the millennia and the grammar has changed and simplified, it's still pretty much the same language as sung by Homer.
Let's also not forget Sanskrit, while not a living language is still a very old and quite primitive Indo-European language. Linguists know a lot about it.
So, while the development of Proto-Indo-European required some guessing, it's based upon some hard science.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday October 31 2015, @08:57AM
Perhaps, and forsooth, I did overstate the point. Mayhaps I intended to say that a "made-up" language is one for which we possess no extant text? More a Classicist approach than that of an archaeolinguist, but one I would stick to. Are you saying that the completely fantastic created languages do not follow rules of syntax, grammar, phonemes and semantics? Of course they do. They are freer in regard to those than someone trying to recreate a proto language, but the parameters (hey! I just used "parameters" in sentence! And I think is is correct usage! Do I get extra hipster points?) are the same. And, Sanskrit is far from a "primitive" language. Has cases no one has ever used, just in case the opportunity should come up. And Linear B? Much like Linear A, the bastardized accounting language of the Minoan civilization! All Cretans are liars! And it is true because one of them said so! So there! Minoan bull-riding Minotaur feeding bastards!