Dollar on a platter

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Once the word Taller meant a simple plate and was Slavic. In Slavic Bohemia, a new silver coin of an unprecedented size was called a "plate", by analogy with how they say about a large sheet of paper - a "sheet". The Slavic history of Europe emerges even in the word "dollar".

Who does not now know about the dollar - the monetary unit of the United States of America, which is essentially the world's currency? However, not everyone knows the origin of the word "dollar". I foresee that this statement of mine will cause the outrage of many readers: what is unknown here, when everywhere and everywhere, including on the Internet, it is said that the dollar got its name from a large silver coin - thaler, which was very common in Europe in the Middle Ages. In turn, thaler was named so because it first began to be minted in the city of Joachimstal in Bohemia, that is, in the Czech Republic. These coins began to be called by the name of the place of their issue "joachimsthalers" or abbreviated as "thalers". But since it sounds too complicated for the Russian ear, and the Czech name of the city was Jachymov, in Russian these coins were called "efimkov".

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However, rather than retelling for a long time, it is better to cite one small Internet publication called "The History of Thaler, Piastre and Dollar": The history of the world's most famous coin is very interesting. It began not in the New World, but in a little-known valley in Bohemia (now the territory of the Czech Republic). In 1519, near the city of Jachymov, whose name in German sounded like Joachimstal, huge deposits of silver were discovered. Counts Schlick began to mint large metal coins from it, which were called guldengroshi, or joachimsthalers. This name, abbreviated to thaler, was given to large German silver coins in denominations of 60 to 72 kreutzers. Some of them were very elegantly executed. German thalers existed until 1872. The name "thaler" sounded differently in different countries: talar (Saxony), tallero (Italy), tolar (Slovenia), talari (Ethiopia), tala (Samoa), dala (Hawaii), daalder (Netherlands), daler (Denmark and Sweden) and dollar. The name dollar was first used in Scotland for Jacob VI's thirty-chilling coin in 1567-1571. Dollar coins, as well as their fractions - half, quarter, one-eighth and one-sixteenth - were minted in Edinburgh under Charles II (1676-1682) long before they became the standard currency in the American colonies. Unlike other countries, the Russians left the first part of the original name (Joachim) and called these large silver coins “efimk” (singular “efimok”).