Tim May wrote:

Left as an exercise: the PIE origins of "mark" (another common word for a unit of money), "dollar" (ditto), and "crown." For extra credit, "peso," "peseta," and variants. For extra extra credit, "florin."

Just guessing for fun here, not looking them up (My Oxford dictionary would tell me too quickly, as would any search engine, though maybe not as authoritatively. I'll check them out in a day or two) "Mark" is old word for borderlands. Sounds unlikely. Maybe it is related to "market"? I wonder if there is some word for "traveller" that is behind "mark", "market", "merchant", or "march"? A word for traveller could come to mean a foreigner in one context & a pedlar or merchant in another. Stranger things have happened - one IE word, also meaning traveller, lies behind both "guest" and "host" (in both senses) as well as "hostile", "hospitable", "hospital", "hostel", & "hotel". Or is it "mark" as in sign or symbol, a coin "marked" with some token of the issuers? And "marchen" (pardon my lack of umlaut) are folk tales. (Travellers tales?). "March" the month is the month of Mars (Ares), associated with war - another possible link to borderlands but it sounds too far-fetched, the old Germans had plenty of their own godlets without importing Roman or Greek ones. "Dollar" is "thaler" or "taler", German for "valley", and related to English "dale". I half remember some story about silver mined in such-and-such a place being minted into Austrian coins called <whatever>thalers, later shortened to "taler" and used as such in north America and the Caribbean. Maybe there is a further connection to other words implying low or things or states - dell, doldrums, dolour - I think the resemblance between "dale" and "vale" is coincidence. "crown" (AKA "krone", "kroner", "krona", "koruna") is pretty obvious, being coins stamped with a picture of a crown (presumably to show that the king issued them) I've no idea of the earlier history of those words. I guess that "crown" must be related to "corona". Perhaps it is connected to "curve" or "circle" - no, that sounds far-fetched. It can also mean the top of the head in English but that might just be a more recent extension of meaning. Many currency names originate as units of weight. Being British I think of pounds and pence as money, so maybe "peso"/"peseta" were words for a unit of weight, perhaps etymologically related to "pound" - that feels more likely than a connection to "penny", because there is a French word for weight "pois", and Spanish is close to French. A Florin is a coin stamped with a picture of a flower. I think that was the symbol of the city of Florence AKA Firenze, but the name has since been used in Britain and Hungary ("Forint"). "Florin" is recently connected with "flower", "flourish" and so on & more distantly to "bloom" I think. Maybe a PIE root to do with blooming, flowing, flume, or even flame???? Some idea of the sap rising in the spring & things bursting to life? German often has "f" or "pf" where we have "f" so maybe a connection to "pflanzen" which has to be related to "plant" and I think distantly to "clan" (via Celtic P<->K) and maybe even "branch" and "clade" - the idea of a tree? I think I need to go and lie down. And I mustn't even speculate about "penny", "pound", "lira", "lev", "lek", "lat" "dinar", "drachma", "shekel", "sol", "rouble", "rupee", anna, "dam", "s(c)hilling", "franc", "real", "rial", "riyal", "escudo", "afghani", and that grotesque name for a currency, the "euro"? (Just saying that it is named after Europe gets no points at all. Or even marks. Same goes for "Afghani"). All (with 1 or 2 possible exceptions) good Indo-European names. (I suspect "bolivar" isn't IE either). Not to mention the slang terms - "bob", "quid", "nicker". You Americans have "buck" (no idea), "quarter" (obvious but silly) and "dime" (? mispronounciation of something to do with "decimal"?) With luck, about a quarter of that bears some resemblance to truth. I won't say I made it all up over a cup of tea in a break from work, but... Ken Brown Nuts! cypherpunks@lne rejected the posting!