OT coins and currency

Nomad of Norad -- David C Hall wrote:
> Hi R (R A Brown), in <43C0D5B4.3020908@...> on Jan 8 you wrote:
[snip]
>>>plurals, hence the "twenty-dollar bill" rather than the
>>>*"twenty-dollars bill"), so using "euro" in English sans -s sounds
>>>very strange.  By which I mean, it sounds French. :)
>>
>>To us Brits 'twould sound OK in some contexts, but not in all. IMO while
>>it is desirable to have an officially established form for the singular,
>>I think it would have been better to allow national languages to decide
>>their own plurals by usage.
>
>
> I have a sneaking suspicion this will happen anyway, no matter what the
> bureaucrats do...  :-D
I am sure you are right. I cannot image people generally saying "two
cents" if they are referring to US, Canadian, Ausie or NZ currency, but
saying "two cent" if they are referring to the euro currency. That is
IMO just petty prescriptiveness. It won't work.

Similarly people are going to say and write 'euros' where the context
demands it, whatever the bureaucrats say. But it is just this clearly
stupid & petty bureaucratic prescriptiveness that has given the EU a bad
name in my country and fills pro-Europeans like myself with dismay &
frustration.
===============================

Henrik Theiling wrote:
 > Hi!
 >
 > Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> writes:
 >
 >>>...
 >>>I liked 'euro' better because Germans insisted on pronouncing 'ecu' as
 >>>[?e:'ky:], like French.
 >>
 >>What's bad about that?
 >
 >
 > Well, it then feels like it's a French currency.

Well, the 'ecu' was indeed once a French coin   :-)

 >To make it neutral,
 > it should have a neutral name.  And most easily, it's neutral when
 > everyone has a native name for it.

Agreed - but not everyone does have a _native_ name for the 'euro'. see
below:

====================================

taliesin the storyteller wrote:
 > * R A Brown said on 2006-01-07 17:46:01 +0100
[snip]
 >>
 >>The official abbreviation, according to ISO 4217, for "euro" is "EUR"
 >>in all languages. There is no official abbreviation for "cent", but
 >>one could reflect on using either "c" or "ct".
 >>{/unquote}
 >
 >
 > I think it was Lithuania or Latvia that lacks the |eu|-diphthong/
 > combination completely, pronouncing it as /ei/: /eiro/ and /eira/
 > instead of /euro/, /evro/ and similar, and that this had led to some
 > conflict as the EU insisted the u was pronounced... (or was it that the
 > ei-speakers also wanted to write Euro as Eiro?)

I don't know about Latvia, but the Lithuanian for 'Europe' is "Eiropa".
Whether the Lithuanians actually expressed a wish to be allowed to call
the 'euro' an "eiro", I don't know. But the name, it seems, must be
'euro' even though the combo 'eu' is pronounced quite differently in the
various countries and, indeed, is a foreign combo for some.

I notice that officially the Greeks alone are permitted to dispense with
those two vowels and call it /ev'ro/. But the rest of us must have 'eu'.

I feel sure a better & more imaginative and truly neutral name, without
these phonetic complications, could have chosen. But I fear it is too
late now.

FWIW, by Welsh speakers 'euro' is less likely to be associated with
Europe (which is 'Ewrop' in Welsh), and more likely to be associated
with _gold_ - cf:
euraid = golden
eurych = goldsmith
euro = to gild        :)

--
Ray
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http://www.carolandray.plus.com
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