dant@tekla.TEK.COM (Dan Tilque;1893;92-789;LP=A;60HC) (08/23/87)
>> P.S.: About extra letters: is the "$"-sign really the writing in one space >> of "U" and "S"? So: "U.S. dollar" --> "$ dollar" > Henry Spencer: >Close. What I have been told is that the dollar sign is a scrunched form >of PS, with the loop of the P getting lost in the shuffle. Why PS? Because >the US took a long time to get its act together on a national currency, and >the Mexican peso saw considerable use meanwhile. Hmm... I remember seeing a 19 century political cartoon which had an S with two vertical bars across it. I don't remember if these bars were from a U or not. The text of the book (it was a history book I think) claimed that this was the origin of the dollar sign. I have a feeling that the dollar sign has almost as many "origins" as the word "ok" does. --- Dan Tilque dant@tekla.tek.com or dant@tekla.UUCP This got me to wondering: what do those countries who don't have a special currency symbol put in the ASCII currency location. Please e-mail responses, we don't need to flood the net with 600 messages saying the same thing. I'll summarize.
alan@mucs.UUCP (09/06/87)
Many currency symbols, especially those with a long history, are composed of an alphabetic with some decoration, which in many cases has degenerated into a stroke or two (rather like mathematicians' symbols for The Natural Numbers, The Reals, etc). For example, the English pound is written as an L (usually a curly one) with a stroke through it. "L" because the old Norman word for it was "livre", derived from the same Latin root (librus?) as the Italian "lire". "$" is used in other countries which call their currency units "dollars"; I believe the Spanish conquistadores were responsible for spreading this convention. I would conjecture that the "S" which forms the basis of it comes from the Latin "solidus"; like the pound/livre, the name changed at some point but the symbol remained the same. Why do I guess 'solidus'? In my earlier years, Britain had a peculiar multiple-radix system of reckoning money in which the units were pounds, shillings and pence, of which an instance is L1/12s/3d: L for libri, s for solidi, and d for denarii, the old Latin names which were adopted for the units in the middle ages. Alan Wills University of Manchester -- Alan Wills +44-61-273 7121 x5699
wyatt@cfa.harvard.EDU (Bill Wyatt) (09/09/87)
[...] > (2) whilst several posters have discussed the formation > of $ and English Pound Sign & Yen in "and thats why > the word led to the choice of symbol" form, it's worth > recalling that these were established (like most of > our writing conventions) AS PRINTERS KLUDGES - having > to manufacture type was to much of an effort for any > old phoneme to get slapped into 300 -odd sizes, piches, > reversed/you-name-its, so doing it by overstrike and/or > other cheats was commonsense. > > until typesetting came along spelling was in the eye > of the beholder. If it sounded right then you writ it. > > if fome mechanical geniuf had invented a way to do the ^^^^^^ > big letter "f" fenfibly we'd probaby still be ufing it. > Small quibble here - the letter looked like an `f', but was really a large `s' like the integral sign, sort of. In addition, the normal `s' was used at the end of a word, so it still would have been `genuis'. -- Bill UUCP: {seismo|ihnp4}!harvard!cfa!wyatt Wyatt ARPA: wyatt@cfa.harvard.edu (or) wyatt%cfa@harvard.harvard.edu BITNET: wyatt@cfa2 SPAN: 17410::wyatt (this will change, sometime)
dant@tekla.TEK.COM (Dan Tilque;1893;92-789;LP=A;60HC) (09/11/87)
[Cleaning up some unfinished business before I leave for 2+ weeks.] In article <2276@zeus.TEK.COM> I write: >This got me to wondering: what do those countries who don't have a >special currency symbol put in the ASCII currency location. Please >e-mail responses, we don't need to flood the net with 600 messages >saying the same thing. I'll summarize. Three people sent me mail describing a generic currency symbol which a few people use. For example: Anders Andersson (Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden): ] ! ISO specifies a kind of neutral "currency sign", which looks like a ] ! small circle with four small strokes pointing outwards from it (see ]* *! the simple bitmap to the left, but make a circle out of that small ] *** ! square - the resolution could be better than 7x5). I don't know of ] * * ! any practical meaning for this symbol, which is sometimes called ] *** ! "sol". I considered it a nuisance when I started programming in BASIC ]* *! many years ago, as I could never decide how to pronounce LEFT$(...). ]This sign appears on some terminals of those implementing the Swedish 7-bit ]ISO character set, but not all of them (they have a dollar sign instead). I ]believe it's similarly "common" on other European terminals (ISO standards ]seem to include it everywhere). I've learned that it's used in the Russian ](Cyrillic) standard also, but the Russians are probably the only ones who ]would actually *object* to seeing dollar signs on their equipment... To me, ]the "sol" is no more useful than a swastika (!) in the case I would actually ]like to talk about dollars. ]In Britain there is a Pound Sterling symbol, but it replaces the #, not $. ]I think this is good, as having the same code to represent symbols denoting ]totally different currencies could lead to fatal misunderstandings (in a ]commercial contract, for example). This was pointed out in net.nlang about ]a year ago I think. I agree 100%. I wasn't aware that the British used a different binary representation for their currency symbol, but they made a good choice. Besides the pun, the commecial pount symbol is one of the least used characters and the few places that it is used, its form seldom has special significance. ]There is no particular "currency symbol" in Swedish. We use "kr" or nowadays ]the international abbreviation "SEK". I think the whole idea of a common ]place for any nation's "currency symbol" is a bad one, just as bad as a ]common place for any nation's "accented letter". It just leads to more ]confusion, and prevents me from using the "alternative" signs. If I talk ]about dollars, then I mean dollars and not Pounds Sterling or kronor or ]markka or pesetas or rubel or drakhmas or yen... No one mentioned what the Japanese do to get a Yen symbol. I suspect that they just use a capital Y. --- Dan Tilque dant@tekla.tek.com or dant@tekla.UUCP
mms@utgpu.UUCP (09/13/87)
In article <2395@zeus.TEK.COM> dant@tekla (Dan Tilque) writes: > No one mentioned what the Japanese do to get a Yen symbol. I suspect that > they just use a capital Y. When the Japanese use a 7- or 8-bit ASCII-style character set, they replace the backslash character with the yen symbol (a capital Y for Yen, like S for Solidus or L for Libra, with one or more usually two horizontal strokes through the vertical bar). This took a lot of getting used to for me (I use Sony and NEC micros around the house for various things), especially when (i) programming in C and (ii) looking at all the cute pictures that appear in people's .signatures made with /-| and \. In the 16-bit full JIS Japanese character set, I suspect they do the same and just add a backslash somewhere further on, but this is just conjecture. -- -- john j. chew (v3.0) poslfit@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu +1 416 463 5403 (300/1200 bps) poslfit@utorgpu.bitnet {cbosgd,decvax,mnetor,utai,utcsri,{allegra,linus}!utzoo}!utgpu!poslfit "Script-G for open, sub-delta for durchschnitt"
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (09/14/87)
> Small quibble here - the letter looked like an `f', but was really > a large `s' like the integral sign, sort of... Exactly like the integral sign, modulo possible minor mutations since, since that's where the integral sign came from. Short for "sum". -- "There's a lot more to do in space | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology than sending people to Mars." --Bova | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry