Today’s word of the day, thanks to Vocabulary.com’s Word of the Day (https://www.vocabulary.com/word-of-the-day/), is appraisal. Pronounced / əˈpreɪ zəl /, the noun, derived from the verb appraise, means “the act of estimating or judging the nature or value of something or someone,” “an estimate of value, as for sale, assessment, or taxation; valuation,” or “an estimate or considered opinion of the nature, quality, importance, etc.” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/appraisal).

According to Etymonline.com, appraisal appears “by 1784, American English, from appraise + -al (2). The figurative sense of ‘act of appraising’ (originally a term of literary criticism) is from 1817. Appraisement is earlier (1640s)” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/appraisal). Appraise appears “c. 1400, appreisen, ‘to set a value on,’ from stem of Old French aprisier ‘appraise, set a price on’ (14c., Modern French apprécier), from Late Latin appretiare ‘value, estimate,’ from ad ‘to’ (see ad-) + pretium ‘price’ (see price (n.)). The original English spelling, also apprize, was altered by influence of praise” (ibid.). So it may be that the pronunciation during Early Modern English may have been something that rhymed with size.

Instead of talking about something that happened on this date some time in the past, today I want to spend a little time on the International Phonetic Alphabet.

“In 1886 a group of French and English language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet). The problem they were addressing was how to represent the speech of people from different languages. Western modern languages mostly have an alphabet, and those alphabets tend to be quite similar. But the pronunciations that were represented by those letters often differed, particularly between English and French, or really between English and any other European language (except Basque). English, unlike the other European languages, had gone through the Great Vowel Shift. In addition, some of the sound changes covered by Grimm’s Law or Verner’s Law happened in the Germanic languages but not the Romance languages.

“The idea of the alphabet had been suggested to Passy by Otto Jespersen. It was developed by Passy along with other members of the association, principally Daniel Jones. The original IPA alphabet was based on the Romic alphabet, an English spelling reform created by Henry Sweet that in turn was based on the Palaeotype alphabet of Alexander John Ellis, itself derived from Lepsius Standard Alphabet first used for transcribing Ancient Egyptian into German” (ibid.). Initially some of the symbols represented different sounds depending upon the language, but by 1888 the International Phonetics Association had decided that a one-to-one correspondence between a letter and a sound was more useful.

As the IPA worked with more and more languages, there were of necessity some additions. For instance, recently the IPA added symbols to represent the click sounds of Khoisan languages.

I’m going to include an original version of the IPA chart and a copy of the most recent version, just for the sake of comparison. When I indicate the pronunciation of a word, I use the IPA chart rather than something else. I recommend becoming familiar with it. You don’t have to memorize the chart—that would be difficult, unless you have an eidetic memory, and unnecessary, unless you are developing an alphabet for a new language while in the field. So just become familiar with it. It’s a linguistics tool that, in an appraisal, would prove to be of great value.