Talk:Etymology of the Korean currencies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is part of the WikiProject Numismatics, which is an attempt to facilitate the categorization and creation of accurate and formal Numismatism-related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate please visit the project page, where you can join and see a list of open tasks to help with.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
Low	This article has been rated as low-importance on the importance scale.

[edit] Caps

Should Etymology of the Korean Currencies be Etymology of the Korean currencies? Joe I 02:10, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Likely. —Nightstallion (?) 13:51, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

go ahead. --Chochopk 06:39, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] update

I just got through editing some grammar. Do you know which Chinese word "fun" is a cognate of, and what it means (or does it just mean 1/100th of a won/yuan)? And did I restate it correctly (second paragraph of the article)? On a similar note, the fact that yang and tael are cognates is interesting to me since tael seems (from its article) to be primarily a unit of weight which is only secondarily a currency. Was that true of the yang as well? Or am I misunderstanding the tael? Anyway, I enjoyed the article. Ingrid 22:20, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't speak Korean so I can't really tell the meaning of the words in the Korean context. I'm merely looking at the images (hence the Chinese characters) and the English translation (therefore the pronunciation) in the catalogs and making logical conclusions. But I can tell you more about the meanings in Chinese.

Tael (兩): Today it exists primarily as a unit of weight, in fact a "legacy" unit in the sense that metric is "supposedly" the primary system. If you mean tael as a unit of currency today, you probably have to say "1 tael of silver" or "1 tael of gold". This is probably not the case 100~150 years ago. At that time, "1 tael" by itself was absolutely ambiguous. It could mean 1 tael as a measurement of payment, or 1 tael as a measurement of weight. (like "1 pound" in U.K. before they adopted metric units?)

Yuan (圓): Due to westernization in the late 19th century, dollar began being used. A new name "yuan" was created for that. Chinese yuan, Japanese yen, and the short lived Korean won of that time were all approximately 27 g * 0.9 silver. Some conservatives wished to remain using tael as the primary unit, but the reformers won.

Fen (分)/Li (釐): fun and fen are cognate. Today, fen and li mean 1/100 and 1/1000 of the main unit only in the context of currency. In other contexts they mean 1/10 and 1/100. In science, they are like "centi" and "milli" in Western languages (See Chinese_numerals#SI_prefixes). And even in the financial context, they mean 1/10 and 1/100, like 1 "fen" of interest = 10% of interest. Don't ask me why the meaning is different on currency. =(

--Chochopk 00:55, 24 February 2006 (UTC)