Have you ever wondered where a lot of well-known coin denominations came from? Well,the Dollar had its origins in the German 'Thaler' through the Dutch 'Daalder'.When the Scots heard the word 'Thaler',they misinterpreted it,& it became 'Dollar' in the Scots-English language.There is,in fact,a place in Scotland called Dollar.The German 'Reichsthaler' was rendered into Dutch as 'Rijksdaalder',which became the term for the 2-1/2 Gulden coin of the Netherlands after 1815.Rijksdaalder has since been a denomination in its anglicised form - Rixdollar.The Rixdollar was a money of account in the Cape of Good Hope (although specimen notes were printed),but it was an actual coin in Ceylon - the silver Rixdollar of 1821,which has the portrait of King George IV (reigned 1820-30).The famous Ceylon elephant coins of 1808 are denominated in the fractions of the Rixdollar.I have got a 1/192 Rixdollar & a 1/48 Rixdollar. In the British West Indies colonies,the Portuguese gold johannes of 6,400 Reis became known as a 'Joe'.The name later became that of the 22 Guilder denomination of Demarary & Essequibo (British Guiana from 1835, now Guyana).Specimen notes were printed & dual denominated in both Joes & Guilders. If you have any more coin denominations & information about their origin, then you are more than welcome to post here.
I have often wondered whether any country other than Japan created a whole set of new denominations by passing a law. (They did it twice!) At the beginning of the 17th Century the Tokugawas, a family of warlords, took complete control of the Japanese government. Among other things, Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa Shogun, standardized coinage for the entire country, establishing the ryo as the basic unit, with subsidiary bu, shu and mon denominations. The cash coins which had been circulating in Japan for centuries had mon and 4 mon values. 1 ryo was equal to 4 bu, 16 shu, and 4,000 mon. Modern Japanese coinage dates to the third year of the Meiji Emperor's reign, following the overthrow of the Tokugawas, and restoration of the primacy of the Emperor, as a virtual demi-god. The ryo and its progeny met the same fate as their originators when the New Coinage Act was adopted, creating the yen, sen (1/100th yen) and rin (1/10th sen). "En", which is how the Japanese pronounce the denomination, literally means "round", and was adopted to distinguish the new western-style coinage from the rectangular and oval coins previously circulating. A more detailed explanation of those events, including English translations of the key Japanese coinage acts, can be found in Modern Japanese Coinage by Cummings.
And even the German "Taler" is just the short version The word used to be "Thaler", derived from "St. Joachimsthaler". The place where that kind of coin was first minted was called St. Joachimsthal, today Jáchymov (in the Czech Republic), a nice health resort ... Christian
Enter the pound. I read somewhere that the pound became known as the pound because that's how much 240 silver pennies weighed, one pound. The term stuck, the weights changed. The sign, '£' is an L with a line through, the L meaning Libre or Livre.
That is not exactly right. You have put the cart before the horse. The pound was a pound was a pound. From a pound of silver they could get so-many coins of such a certain size. You could get 20 shillings -- big coins, perhaps 1/2 to 2/3 ounce each, depending on whose "pound" your scales were set to. You could get a lot more little coins. The Roman denarius (d for "penny") weighed 3 grams plus, but in the Dark Ages, coins one-third the size were more useful. They took the number 240 as being better than 200 or 300 or 257 because 240 is conveniently a score of dozens. The "pound sterling" really was a pound of silver at one time.
