I got an email for a man who seems to be doing a doctorate on the subject of money from an anthropological or linguistic vantage point. He had read a portion of my article on the subject, which is summarized in this blog. Money is language. There are within this language, many money languages each with their own syntax and rules of construction.
This gentleman sent me three references that dealt with money from an academic perspective. To be frank, they are infantile, childish and ignorant. I would be happy to see someone beginning to think about the subject of money language that I thought about 35 years ago. But it hasn’t happened. I haven't even seen anyone think creatively about money in daily life which I covered 45 years ago in The Seven Laws of Money.
Reading the three references carefully, I found one of them just comparing general linguistic patterns to words about money. For example, how the abbreviation for $100 became a ‘dime’. Generally irrelevant material.
What I found interesting was the selection of the word ‘dollar’ to be the term for American currency in 1785, It was done by Alexander Hamilton (who the feeble-minded mean-spirited Democrats now want to alter on the $10 bill). Hamilton’s proposal was widely accepted because the term was in use for the common American peso and it served well in defiance of the British pound.
According to linguistic sources the word dollar is derived from the name of a silver mine in Bohemia in the mid 16th Century. The mine was in the valley of the town Joachimsthal; valley is thaler. Thaler in central Europe migrated to the world of active trade in Holland in the next century as ‘daler’.
The Dutch brought the ‘daler’ to New Amsterdam, whence it entered the American realm. Alexander Hamilton was a New Yorker. The idea of the dollar was almost automatic in the colonies. It had respect and more than a century of use by 1785.
Thus, our national currency, the dollar.