things that amuse me

[redbird]

I happened to notice a coin on the floor in papersky and rysmiel's home, the day I got here. I said something, rysmiel suggested I put it on the nearest flat surface, and I did, noting that it wasn't Canadian or American, and taking a closer look. Slovenia. 10 somethings. A nice picture of an eel, specifically Proteus anguinus. It says so right there on the 10-stotinov coin.

This morning, I went looking for more pictures of Slovenian currency. This is the old Slovenian money, not the Slovenian design for the euro coins (there's a Wikipedia article on the latter). I found an old page hosted at Angelfire (which I do not love as a hosting site, but that's a separate matter). Somewhat blurry pictures of the coins. Asio otus (an owl) on the 20-stotinov, some sort of winged insect on the 50 (they're not very good photos), and so on. Then I got to the next set of names, and was distracted from the "what animal is this?" theme by the realization that Slovene uses the dual: 1 tolar, 2 tolarja, 5, 10, etc. tolarjev. Typing this out, I note that there's that German word for "valley" again, "tolar" being slightly closer, to my ear, to "thaler" than "dollar" is.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have been reading Jim Butcher too recently: my first reaction was, "Don't pick it up with your bare skin!"

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It was on the floor because I was sorting out my "foreign money" pot into "useful Euros to spend in Schiphol", "useful pounds to spend in Britain" and "totally bizarre money I have had for a long time that the countries don't use any more". I must have dropped one.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

And I still have most of the totally bizarre money you gave me -- some of it has gone into jewelry.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Interesting to find languages distinguishing between the dual and the (other) plural. I wonder how many do that?

Or how many languages distinguish, as Tolkien's Elvish tongues do, between the general plural or the class plural, the former being for "some of" and the latter for "all of". Though you wouldn't find a class plural on a coin, except from a very poor country indeed.

I got a mixed pack of coins from a friend and have been giving them away

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

I still have a couple of Slovenian coins. One has three trout on it, and is a tolar coin. The other has a salamander, and is also 10 stotinov. If anybody wants these coins, please let me know! ETA:No it isn't. Looking again more carefully, it's the exact same coin as in redbird's post, misidentified on the coin package. It's so small that it's very hard to read.

Re: I got a mixed pack of coins from a friend and have been giving them away

[redbird]

The tolar is tempting, though I know it would be looked at happily, and then dropped on my dresser with other miscellaneous foreign coins, like the 50-kopek piece I found on the sidewalk years ago, and an Irish pound that Rysmiel gave me after Ireland started using euros, where it would be ignored and in due course probably fall on the floor (there are actual bags in my dresser for things I have a bunch of, like Hong Kong and Australian dollars, and/or expect to spend someday, namely pounds and euros).

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't "tolar" and "thaler" be pronounced almost identically--much like 'taller'? The vowels might be slight different, though.