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APPRECIATING THE PRICE

8/1/2018

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I think you'll appreciate the etymology of the word appreciate! It was borrowed in the 1650s from the Latin word appretiatus, which actually referred more to the increasing value of money definition than to the respectful emotion towards someone else. Here we can see the prefix ap-, which is just an alternate way of writing ad-, an affix denoting a movement "towards" and coming from Proto-Indo-European ad, meaning "to" or "near". The root of the word here is pretium, which meant "price" (this makes sense considering the overall meaning). Pretium may be reconstructed to the Proto-Indo-European root per, meaning "to traffic". So, if we go as far back as we can, appreciate​ means "near traffic". A bit more reasonably, in only the near past, it meant "towards price". It wasn't until the 1830s that the word gained the emotional definition, and this really shows in the usage over time, as it spiked dramatically in that period.
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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a senior studying government and linguistics at Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law. 
      If I don't cover it soon, I probably already did it
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