Recently I listened to an hour and forty minute YouTube discussion between three experts in fantasy. You can listen to it here if you are interested. The topic was to define the differences between classic fantasy and modern fantasy. Spoiler - they didn't get very far. They had different definitions of "Classic" right off the bat, and even settling on "traditional" vs "modern" was pretty much impossible, since it was pointed out that many fantasy stories written in the last twenty years - so-called modern - have prototypes dating back fifty or more years ago. And while there are general characteristics that can define an era - for example modern fantasy is more focused on the characters, their thoughts and emotions, whereas the more traditional fantasy was written from a more remote, third-person perspective - nevertheless, examples of any style can be found in any era. The best description is that fantasy is cyclical - with lots of authors jumping on a popular bandwagon, and then lots of other ones reacting against it, until the reaction becomes the new bandwagon that is reacted against. Around it goes. Thus, the characteristics associated with one period or another can actually be found in any period. Still, I learned a lot - for example how much Dungeons and Dragons influenced fantasy during the 80's & 90's so that today's popular progressive and RPG Lit fantasy is not new at all.
The one other aspect I found very interesting as a writer, was subject of translation. Not the translation of the book into another language, but the translation of a story that is supposedly set in a secondary world, which is to say, an imaginary world, where English is not spoke, but the story is written in English. The question was how does a writer use English to portray that different language and that different world of their fictional characters? And how much does their use of language color their imaginary world?
One example brought up is the very popular romance-fantasy book The Fourth Wing. Though a fantasy set in something like medieval times, the story is told in the language of teens today - the teens in the internet era - which is the language of its target audience - despite the fact that much of the language it uses could not have been relevant, or even meaningful, in the time period the story is set in. Its language is not used to build the imaginary world and society. Instead it speaks to its readers in their own language to tell them the story.
The flip side of that coin is Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings books. In his books he uses the English language to serve a different purpose. It is archaic, flowery, and unfamiliar to most modern readers of English - used precisely to give a sense of strangeness and remoteness, as well as the depth and color to his imaginary world. He uses the language to make his imaginary world different from the world of his readers. While his characters speak a style of English that is deliberately not the readers' everyday English, as in The Fourth Wing. It is meant to sound more like a literal translation of the characters' and narrator's imaginary language in order to convey to the readers that this world is not theirs. His use of language may be beautiful, and evocative, but it requires the reader to learn and adopt the style to read and enjoy the story.
As a reader, I've DNFed both The Fellowship of the Rings and the Kings of the Wyld. The first because Tolkien's language didn't speak to me, and in the second book, because the language was too commonplace - its use took me out of the imaginary world and back into this one. Not being a huge reader of fantasy, I don't encounter this problem much, but for me, it has to be somewhere in the middle between archaic and modern, or perhaps more accurately, a skillful mix of the modern and archaic. A good example this is Ellis Peter's Cadfael historical fiction stories. She does an excellent job in my opinion of creating a sense of the time and place of twelfth century England by using the terms of that period for specific things, and describing places, actions and attitudes of the period, with a more modern writing style.
As a writer, I've not written stories set in archaic times. All of my stories, SF and fantasy, this world or another, have an Edwardian air about them, i.e. an early 20th century type of setting no matter what I write. Plus, all of the people are descendants of Earth. I try, however, not to assume that they speak English. At times I try to imply in my "translation" that their language may be something closer to Chinese than English - though this can be awkward at times. And in The Bright Black Sea, I had fun trying to imply that they did not use a 10 based math system, but a 12 based one. But for the most part, what I mainly try to do is to avoid using popular phrases, curse words, and names of things that sound too much of our time. For example, a I might call something a "ball and net" court rather than a tennis court, since "tennis" feels too specific for a game played 10,000 years from now on another planet, even if that planet was once colonized by people from earth.
So while I don't deal with the issue to any great extent, it is something I've thought about.
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