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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;seth77, post: 7648177, member: 56653&quot;]I have no knowledge of Arabic and my knowledge of islamic history is very limited to the parts relevant about the contact between Europe/The Eastern Empire and Islam.</p><p><br /></p><p>That being said, I think that the contact with Roman (or romanized) culture is also what brought the &#039;dinar&#039; to the Arabs and then in the muslim world more generally. Probably in a similar way in which &#039;dinero&#039; came to mean money in general in Spanish, &#039;denaro&#039; in Italian or &#039;argent&#039; in French (or Occitan) -- note that Italian and Occitan have also &#039;soldi&#039; and &#039;sous&#039; (also terms with heavy and deep numismatic roots) as synonyms for &#039;money&#039;. But this is not all -- Japanese has the general &#039;okane&#039; as a noun for &#039;money&#039; while the stem kanji &#039;kin&#039; has as a primary meaning &#039;gold&#039; and/or &#039;metal&#039; in general.</p><p><br /></p><p>Back to the denarius/denier/denar/dinar, I think it&#039;s likely that the term became a colloquialism for &#039;money&#039; rather early in Roman history and was kept in common speech (even after it became obsolete as a an actual physical coin at the end of the 3rd century) as monies of account. In fact the Vandal silver pieces were expressed in the &#039;denarius&#039; denomination, so was the &quot;siliqua&quot; of the 6th century Eastern Empire probably. The silver coinages of the Merovingians were also &#039;denarii&#039;. So this colloquialism was probably passed from culture to culture to be used where the language allowed for it to take root. It&#039;s an interesting instance of words going through history like living things, at least in a sort of darwinian sense anyway.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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