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From: george@Cs.Ucl.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Currency symbols
Message-ID: <38600001@pyr1>
Date: Tue, 8-Sep-87 16:59:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: pyr1.38600001
Posted: Tue Sep  8 16:59:00 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Sep-87 06:47:21 EDT
References: <1261@mucs.UX.CS.MAN.AC.UK>
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Nf-From: Cs.Ucl.ac.uk!george    Sep  8 20:59:00 1987


	I have not been following this discussion Live and so cannot
tell if these have been mentioned before. apologies if redundant info


	(1)	several books notably "I Claudius" by Robert Graves
		discuss in minor ways the adaptation of the roman
		alphabet by decree and/or changes in usage.

		the shift to explicit U/V comes to mind here

	(2)	whilst several posters have discussed the formation
		of $ and English Pound Sign & Yen in "and thats why
		the word led to the choice of symbol" form, it's worth
		recalling that these were established (like most of
		our writing conventions) AS PRINTERS KLUDGES - having
		to manufacture type was to much of an effort for any
		old phoneme to get slapped into 300 -odd sizes, piches,
		reversed/you-name-its, so doing it by overstrike and/or
		other cheats was commonsense. 

		until typesetting came along spelling was in the eye
		of the beholder. If it sounded right then you writ it.
	
		if fome mechanical geniuf had invented a way to do the
		big letter "f" fenfibly we'd probaby still be ufing it.

		ditto rather nasty double "SS" symbol added to german
		typewriters during war according to at least one novel
		(brrrr eugh!)
	

	(3)	printers hacks would probably cover 75% plus of the
		common problems with accent marks & currency signs
		if someone wrote a filter to do overstrike-on-pattern
		that was small and fast and portable enough to use.

		-if it works on a Teletype 33 why can't it work on a sun?

		-why dont we all junk our 32k crocks & go back to uppercase
		only telex? there's only 15 MILLION plus installed machines
		out there... and they appear to be QUITE happy to use
		"byte-stuffing" codes to send special characters down the
		line. (see T.61)

EuroCheques have a nice wee box before the space for amount and a book
listing the legal 2 and 3 letter combinations for all allowed currencies.
since there is no symbol for ECU and anyone on an EEC grant will have a
LOT of experience writing *that* modernism and since furthermore there
should shortly be european currency at least for higher denomination
quantities perhaps we can all sit back and watch social pressure drive
a change in our keyboard layout. 

George Michaelson
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