Back when I was collecting coins... long ago...I heard another story about
how the
US Dollar sign came into use. This may be apocryphal, but here it is
During the mid 1800's US dollar coins used a stylized US with a narrow U
embedded
in the wider S. This became the $ WITH 2 LINES which over the years modern
typographers
gradually replaced with the SINGLE LINE $, which was often typeset as the
Spanish Blazon.
US ... into 2 lines... into 1 line... into $. Hmmmm.. sounds definitely
like currency devaluation to me.
Clive :-)}
---------
From: Daniel Glazman
To: unicode
Subject: Re: HTML - i18n / NCR & charsets
Date: Monday, December 02, 1996 1:50PM
In message <1.5.4.32.19961130145612.00666044@mail.netvision.net.il> 30 Nov
1996 16:56:12, rosenne@NetVision.net.il wrote:
> At 13:27 30/11/96 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
> > ISO8879 names for Windows CP 1252 80-9F (128-160) entities:
> >
> > 83 (131) -- ? -- florin
> >
> >What's a florin? I know it's the old UK name for what was two
> >shillings, but Bill obviously means something else here.
>
> Florin is the Dutch Guilder, a.k.a. HFl and Gulden. It is derived from the
> name of the city Florence, a.k.a. Firence, where banking was invented. Too
> bad the Europeans are so confused.
Like many other currencies (forint for instance).
Well... "dollar" comes from "thaller" which used to be a weight
of gold. Too bad the non-europeans are also so confused.
And TMCB reminded us that the $ sign comes a spanish blazon...
</Daniel>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:33 EDT