[comp.std.internat] Currency symbols

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

george@Cs.Ucl.ac.uk (09/08/87)

	I have not been following this discussion Live and so cannot
tell if these have been mentioned before. apologies if redundant info


	(1)	several books notably "I Claudius" by Robert Graves
		discuss in minor ways the adaptation of the roman
		alphabet by decree and/or changes in usage.

		the shift to explicit U/V comes to mind here

	(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.

		ditto rather nasty double "SS" symbol added to german
		typewriters during war according to at least one novel
		(brrrr eugh!)
	

	(3)	printers hacks would probably cover 75% plus of the
		common problems with accent marks & currency signs
		if someone wrote a filter to do overstrike-on-pattern
		that was small and fast and portable enough to use.

		-if it works on a Teletype 33 why can't it work on a sun?

		-why dont we all junk our 32k crocks & go back to uppercase
		only telex? there's only 15 MILLION plus installed machines
		out there... and they appear to be QUITE happy to use
		"byte-stuffing" codes to send special characters down the
		line. (see T.61)

EuroCheques have a nice wee box before the space for amount and a book
listing the legal 2 and 3 letter combinations for all allowed currencies.
since there is no symbol for ECU and anyone on an EEC grant will have a
LOT of experience writing *that* modernism and since furthermore there
should shortly be european currency at least for higher denomination
quantities perhaps we can all sit back and watch social pressure drive
a change in our keyboard layout. 

George Michaelson
----------------
JANET:	george@uk.ac.ucl.cs
UUCP:	{...mcvax!}ukc!ucl-cs!george
OTHER:	what are you doing wasting DoD network resources anyhow?

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'.
-- 

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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.
-- 
--
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henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (09/14/87)

>		if fome mechanical geniuf had invented a way to do the
>		big letter "f" fenfibly we'd probaby still be ufing it.

If you look at an italic lowercase F, you will see the character you
allude to with a small horizontal stroke across it.  That is to say,
there is no mechanical problem with doing it.  It's simply fallen out
of use.

(This is one place, incidentally, where an italic font is *not* just a
slanted roman font.)
-- 
"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

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

zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) (09/16/87)

In article <8574@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
> If you look at an italic lowercase F, you will see the character you
> allude to with a small horizontal stroke across it...  
> (This is one place, incidentally, where an italic font is *not* just a
> slanted roman font.)

Another is the lower case a:

 ***        ****
*   *      *   *
    *      *   *
 ****      *   *
*   *      *   *
*   *      *   *
 *** *      *** *

(well, pretend the second one is slanted...)

-- 
Copyright 1987 Ben Cranston (you may redistribute ONLY if your recipients can).
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