Re: USAGE: Currencies and -s

At 10:12 am +0200 30/8/00, BP Jonsson wrote:
>At 01:09 30.8.2000 -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
>>Except that English speakers do not speak about "crowns" with reference
>>to currency unless they want to sound like an eighteenth century
>>Enlightenment
>>philosopher, so we don't use that term.  :)
>
>Well, then you have to learn to distinguish between "krona/kronur"
>"krona/kronor" "krone/kroner" "kroona/kroonad" and whatever the Czech call
>theirs in the plural,
IIRC krouna (s), krouny (pl.)

>and use them properly,
But that'd mean getting the case endings right in Czech & in Slovak ;)


>or change your way of
>thinking.  Anyway 50 öre (1/2 krona) is the last < 1 SEK denomination still
>recognized, so you soon won't run the risk of having to say "half a crown"!
>;-)>
<sigh> I grew up with half crowns.  You get five Mars bars for half a
crown.  That's 12.5p in the new currency which now won't even get you half
a Mars bar  :=(

>We really do prefer _crown_ as the anglification --
So, apparently do the Czechs and, I assume, the Slovaks.  Certainly when I
was in the Czech Republic this summer, Czechs always called them crowns
when speaking English.

>and THE eighteenth
>century Enlightenment philosophers! --
Rather a red herring, methinks.  Brits of my generation were well used to
'crowns' - or at least half crowns - as coins.

<sigh> Why do north Americans assume that American English is the only
yard-stick to judge the language by?

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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