7 ms·

Why is a Dollar like a Neanderthal

68 points by chana_masala 5y ago

hakfoo 5y ago
I'm surprised that the Dutch "Leewendaalder" (Lion Dollar) wasn't mentioned in the discussion. It was a coin of similar size to the 8 reales, also circulating in the 1500s and 1600s. The Dutch presence in what would become New York and other colonies would have been a likely route for the term to enter the colonial vernacular.
- bartvk 5y ago
  Talking about Dutch reminds me of the old commercial saying "uw gulden is hier een daalder waard", translated "your guilder is worth a daler/thaler/dollar here".
  - aarchi 5y ago
    I always find it interesting how frequently Dutch is intelligible, knowing German and some basic sound shifts: „Ihr Gulden ist hier einen Thaler wert“
    - paleotrope 5y ago
      Dutch and Deutsch? I mean it's the same language separated by hundreds of years.
perl4ever 5y ago
"the pencil-making family that had been Schmidt ("smith") became Faber" It's interesting to consider how many common names are forms of "Smith" that an English speaker might not recognize. I've idly imagined writing a story where all the characters' last names are some variation on Smith. For instance: Ferraro Haddad Kovács Kowalski Herrero Kuznets
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > It's interesting to consider how many common names are forms of "Smith" It's especially an interesting contrast to China, where common last names tend to be originally aristocratic.
  - gradschoolfail 5y ago
    Yepp! Never read Guns,Germs&Steel, but premodern China never really had decentralized steelworking. a cursory google shows that the mongolian words for steel and iron are similar to the ones in Chinese, my conjecture is that the chinese words are actually loaned from a barbarian culture not the other way round.. (genghis khan probably came from a smithy family btw) Maybe this is why the post roman west has always been quicker to adopt bottom-uppitism instead of elitism. it runs in the families..
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > premodern China never really had decentralized steelworking There was formally a state monopoly on iron that would have made local smithing illegal, but there were not enough state smithies to serve that purpose, so the general assumption is that illegal smithies were common. > genghis khan probably came from a smithy family btw I have not heard of this and it is facially implausible; the Mongols were not a metalworking people.
      - gradschoolfail 5y ago
        From wikipedia: “ Paul Pelliot saw that the tradition according to which Genghis was a blacksmith was unfounded though well established by the middle of the 13th century.[27]” It seems at least the concept of blacksmiths was familiar to the Mongols before or around the time they went into china. Thats why I explicitly stated “steelworking” instead of “ironworking”. Although they couldnt do it in large quantities the common European smith could use it to enhance his iron products[1] Whereas even the quality of the steel used by the experts in China (even by the 1600s) is questionable. [2] [1] https://the-orb.arlima.net/encyclop/culture/scitech/iron_steel.html https://the-orb.arlima.net/encyclop/culture/scitech/iron_ste... [2] https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_a/advanced/aa_2_2.html https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_a/advanced/aa...
ncmncm 5y ago
The Spanish piece-of-eight was scored so it could be broken up into up to eight pie-shaped "bits". Two bits made a quarter-dollar. Thus, "shave and a haircut, two bits", or "knock knock-a-knock-knock, knock-knock".
- hakfoo 5y ago
  Sort of. It was common to cut them in 2-4-8 pieces, but the coins weren't really designed to provide an affordance for it. There are also some areas where the coins were cut into thirds, or the centre punched out, to provide a value that mapped to a useful local unit. The most common varieties had the Spanish coat of arms on one side, and either the portrait of the monarch, or two globes on the other, depending on date or mint. There were some variations of the coin design where the coat of arms was sized and positioned as a good reference to cut it in four, but the actual lines were raised, so it would actually be one of the harder places to make a cut.
nicolashahn 5y ago
I thought this was going to be a pro-crypto piece
- chana_masala 5y ago
  $SAPIEN coin
- imtringued 5y ago
  I thought it was going to be how money moves not only through space but also time. If there was no inflation then a dollar from 1900 should be just as valuable as a dollar today. However, a dollar is effectively a promise to work. It doesn't store anything. If you bring that dollar into the future it is the same thing as transporting a debt into the future. Why would it ever make sense for the past to have so much power over the future? I mean the idea that we are obligated to the past makes no sense. If anything the past should be obligated to the future. We work today so that tomorrow is a better day.
fsckboy 5y ago
so, it's just the thal/dollar part, and the neander was a meander in the story
- mbeex 5y ago
  I like this kind of meandering.
  - fsckboy 5y ago
    have you done 23 and me? sounds like you might have some meanderthal in you
dcminter 5y ago
By the by, the old Swedish copper "daler" included a 10 daler coin (plåtmynt) that weighed 44lb! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_riksdaler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_riksdaler
toolslive 5y ago
The Croatian currency "Kuna" was named after the marten (or "kuna" in croatia). Other trivia: the Croatian word "marturina" means "tax".
mbeex 5y ago
A little gem of language history. Quite interesting, even for me as a German who already knew a few things about it.
bronlund 5y ago
Neandollar
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> The thaler was from 17c. the more-or-less standardized coin of northern Germany (as opposed to the southern gulden). It also served as a currency unit in Denmark and Sweden (and later was a unit of the German monetary union of 1857-73 equal to three marks). In Greek, "taliro" is a five-valued coin (originally a drachma, but nowadays a five Euro note is also a "taliro"; sometimes a 500 Euro or 5k drachma note may also be called a "taliro"). The word is written as τάληρο in the Greek alphabet, with an eta, which is pronounced as "ee" in modern Greek, so the correct transliteration in a Latin alphabet is rather "talero", with an "e". I wonder then if the root of "talero" is in "thaler".
ochrist 5y ago
In Denmark we still have a 'daler'. It's used (probably mostly by people of a certain age) as a nickname for a two kroner coin. The old rigsdaler was replaced by kroner in 1875, and each Rigsdaler (daler) was worth two kroner. https://www.nationalbanken.dk/da/om_nationalbanken/historie/Sider/1875-1907---Fra-Rigsdaler-til-kroner.aspx https://www.nationalbanken.dk/da/om_nationalbanken/historie/... (in Danish)

68 points by chana_masala 5y ago

I'm surprised that the Dutch "Leewendaalder" (Lion Dollar) wasn't mentioned in the discussion. It was a coin of similar size to the 8 reales, also circulating in the 1500s and 1600s. The Dutch presence in what would become New York and other colonies would have been a likely route for the term to enter the colonial vernacular.

bartvk 5y ago
Talking about Dutch reminds me of the old commercial saying "uw gulden is hier een daalder waard", translated "your guilder is worth a daler/thaler/dollar here".
- aarchi 5y ago
  I always find it interesting how frequently Dutch is intelligible, knowing German and some basic sound shifts: „Ihr Gulden ist hier einen Thaler wert“
  - paleotrope 5y ago
    Dutch and Deutsch? I mean it's the same language separated by hundreds of years.

perl4ever 5y ago

"the pencil-making family that had been Schmidt ("smith") became Faber" It's interesting to consider how many common names are forms of "Smith" that an English speaker might not recognize. I've idly imagined writing a story where all the characters' last names are some variation on Smith. For instance: Ferraro Haddad Kovács Kowalski Herrero Kuznets

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> It's interesting to consider how many common names are forms of "Smith" It's especially an interesting contrast to China, where common last names tend to be originally aristocratic.
- gradschoolfail 5y ago
  Yepp! Never read Guns,Germs&Steel, but premodern China never really had decentralized steelworking. a cursory google shows that the mongolian words for steel and iron are similar to the ones in Chinese, my conjecture is that the chinese words are actually loaned from a barbarian culture not the other way round.. (genghis khan probably came from a smithy family btw) Maybe this is why the post roman west has always been quicker to adopt bottom-uppitism instead of elitism. it runs in the families..
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > premodern China never really had decentralized steelworking There was formally a state monopoly on iron that would have made local smithing illegal, but there were not enough state smithies to serve that purpose, so the general assumption is that illegal smithies were common. > genghis khan probably came from a smithy family btw I have not heard of this and it is facially implausible; the Mongols were not a metalworking people.
    - gradschoolfail 5y ago
      From wikipedia: “ Paul Pelliot saw that the tradition according to which Genghis was a blacksmith was unfounded though well established by the middle of the 13th century.[27]” It seems at least the concept of blacksmiths was familiar to the Mongols before or around the time they went into china. Thats why I explicitly stated “steelworking” instead of “ironworking”. Although they couldnt do it in large quantities the common European smith could use it to enhance his iron products[1] Whereas even the quality of the steel used by the experts in China (even by the 1600s) is questionable. [2] [1] https://the-orb.arlima.net/encyclop/culture/scitech/iron_steel.html https://the-orb.arlima.net/encyclop/culture/scitech/iron_ste... [2] https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_a/advanced/aa_2_2.html https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_a/advanced/aa...

ncmncm 5y ago

The Spanish piece-of-eight was scored so it could be broken up into up to eight pie-shaped "bits". Two bits made a quarter-dollar. Thus, "shave and a haircut, two bits", or "knock knock-a-knock-knock, knock-knock".

hakfoo 5y ago
Sort of. It was common to cut them in 2-4-8 pieces, but the coins weren't really designed to provide an affordance for it. There are also some areas where the coins were cut into thirds, or the centre punched out, to provide a value that mapped to a useful local unit. The most common varieties had the Spanish coat of arms on one side, and either the portrait of the monarch, or two globes on the other, depending on date or mint. There were some variations of the coin design where the coat of arms was sized and positioned as a good reference to cut it in four, but the actual lines were raised, so it would actually be one of the harder places to make a cut.

nicolashahn 5y ago

I thought this was going to be a pro-crypto piece

chana_masala 5y ago
$SAPIEN coin
imtringued 5y ago
I thought it was going to be how money moves not only through space but also time. If there was no inflation then a dollar from 1900 should be just as valuable as a dollar today. However, a dollar is effectively a promise to work. It doesn't store anything. If you bring that dollar into the future it is the same thing as transporting a debt into the future. Why would it ever make sense for the past to have so much power over the future? I mean the idea that we are obligated to the past makes no sense. If anything the past should be obligated to the future. We work today so that tomorrow is a better day.

fsckboy 5y ago

so, it's just the thal/dollar part, and the neander was a meander in the story

mbeex 5y ago
I like this kind of meandering.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  have you done 23 and me? sounds like you might have some meanderthal in you

dcminter 5y ago

By the by, the old Swedish copper "daler" included a 10 daler coin (plåtmynt) that weighed 44lb! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_riksdaler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_riksdaler

toolslive 5y ago

The Croatian currency "Kuna" was named after the marten (or "kuna" in croatia). Other trivia: the Croatian word "marturina" means "tax".

mbeex 5y ago

A little gem of language history. Quite interesting, even for me as a German who already knew a few things about it.

bronlund 5y ago

Neandollar

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> The thaler was from 17c. the more-or-less standardized coin of northern Germany (as opposed to the southern gulden). It also served as a currency unit in Denmark and Sweden (and later was a unit of the German monetary union of 1857-73 equal to three marks). In Greek, "taliro" is a five-valued coin (originally a drachma, but nowadays a five Euro note is also a "taliro"; sometimes a 500 Euro or 5k drachma note may also be called a "taliro"). The word is written as τάληρο in the Greek alphabet, with an eta, which is pronounced as "ee" in modern Greek, so the correct transliteration in a Latin alphabet is rather "talero", with an "e". I wonder then if the root of "talero" is in "thaler".

ochrist 5y ago

In Denmark we still have a 'daler'. It's used (probably mostly by people of a certain age) as a nickname for a two kroner coin. The old rigsdaler was replaced by kroner in 1875, and each Rigsdaler (daler) was worth two kroner. https://www.nationalbanken.dk/da/om_nationalbanken/historie/Sider/1875-1907---Fra-Rigsdaler-til-kroner.aspx https://www.nationalbanken.dk/da/om_nationalbanken/historie/... (in Danish)