On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Mark Leisher wrote:
> The explanation I was given was that words like "toman" are used more like
> "dollar" as opposed to "rial," which is used like "$" (i.e. they are "spelled
> out" in a sense).
No. "Toman" is the unofficial name for "10 Rials". Although Rial is the
official currency and is used for the national budget, for balance sheets,
on bank notes, or anywhere else one may need officiality, Toman is almost
used everywhere else: in conversations, on the price tags, and most
important of all, in people's minds. We convert Rials to Tomans in our
minds when we want to get a sense of the value.
Both Rial and Toman are always spelled. The Rial sign we are proposing is
not that much different from the word Rial. It's only a character in a
legacy charset.
About the other currencies James mentioned, "dinaar" and "gheraan", they
are historic currencies. "gheraan" was the old official name for Rial more
then 80 years ago. "dinaar" is 1/100th of a Rial, and when a US dollar is
worth 9000 Iranian Rials here, you can simply guess why it's not used
anymore, although it's still considered official. I think 50 Dinar coins
went unofficial about 30 years ago.
--roozbeh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:15 EDT