Re: Types of numerals

On 1/4/06, Tristan McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> The recommended forms for use in Australia are $ with one slash (rather
> than the double-slashed form you find in America) and c with no slash.
Most fonts have only a single line in $ here as well, actually,
despite the popularity of the "U superimposed on S" theory of the
symbol's origin.

> (also looking at the keyboard, $ was obviously
> seen as unique enough to get itself a key, whereas ¢ wasn't, so I'd be
> surprised if the unslashed form really was a restricted character
> thing).
Sorry, I didn't mean to claim that "c." was always used only because ¢
was untypable at the moment.  Only that such is the more usual case in
my experience.   I really must learn how to use these "qualifier"
things I keep hearing about when making blanket pronouncements. :)

The ¢ symbol exists on some keyboards (and is easy enough to type on
e.g. the US Mac keyboard layout as alt-4).  It didn't make the cut for
US-ASCII, but it is in EBCDIC and several mostly-ASCII-compatible
variant character sets from pre-Latin-1 days.

> I've never seen anything other than "c" and "¢", rarely if ever with
> fullstops after them. I'm certainly surprised that you've used "¢.",
> with a full stop, implying it's an abbreviation rather than a symbol
> (one never sees "$." or "£." or "€.")
It was a typo!  I haven't seen "¢." ever.  Although I have often seen
things like 0.87¢ on signs where $0.87 is meant.  I've yet to persuade
a shopkeeper to give me the price as written, sadly. :)

> Not that you see any abbreviation for cents very often. Cents don't buy
> you much these days, and cent-coins just have the number on them, the
> unit is implied (and even on dollar and two-dollar coins, the unit is
> written as a word). (I hear NZ is soon to abolish its five cent
> coins---something I hope we quickly adopt, too!)
There are recurring mumbles over here about abolishing the penny and
rounding everything to the nearest nickel ($0.05)...


> the old way of writing money
> as "5l. 11s. 14d." (for five pounds, eleven shillings and fourteen
> pence) had all of them being Latin abbreviations---the "s." stood not
> for "shillings" but "solidus". I imagine the name "solidus" for "/" is
> somehow related to its use in "11/14" for eleven shillings and fourteen
> pence, but I don't know which was the cause-and-effect is: was it called
> "solidus", after the currency because of its use, or was it used because
> it had the same name?
According to Webster, the former.  The "/" symbol was used as a
delimiter between shillings and pence and therefore came to be read
the same way as the "s." abbreviation, as "solidus", which gradually
caught on as a more general term for the "/" itself (which is,
apparently, more properly called a "virgule").


--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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