Why is a Dollar like a Neanderthal | Hacker News Reader

Why is a Dollar like a Neanderthal

etymonline.com

68 pointschana_masala44 comments

"the pencil-making family that had been Schmidt ("smith") became Faber"

It's interesting to consider how many common names are forms of "Smith" that an English speaker might not recognize. I've idly imagined writing a story where all the characters' last names are some variation on Smith.

For instance:

  Ferraro
  Haddad
  Kovács
  Kowalski
  Herrero
  Kuznets

> It's interesting to consider how many common names are forms of "Smith"

It's especially an interesting contrast to China, where common last names tend to be originally aristocratic.

Yepp! Never read Guns,Germs&Steel, but premodern China never really had decentralized steelworking. a cursory google shows that the mongolian words for steel and iron are similar to the ones in Chinese, my conjecture is that the chinese words are actually loaned from a barbarian culture not the other way round.. (genghis khan probably came from a smithy family btw) Maybe this is why the post roman west has always been quicker to adopt bottom-uppitism instead of elitism. it runs in the families..

> premodern China never really had decentralized steelworking

There was formally a state monopoly on iron that would have made local smithing illegal, but there were not enough state smithies to serve that purpose, so the general assumption is that illegal smithies were common.

> genghis khan probably came from a smithy family btw

I have not heard of this and it is facially implausible; the Mongols were not a metalworking people.

From wikipedia:

“ Paul Pelliot saw that the tradition according to which Genghis was a blacksmith was unfounded though well established by the middle of the 13th century.[27]”

It seems at least the concept of blacksmiths was familiar to the Mongols before or around the time they went into china.

Thats why I explicitly stated “steelworking” instead of “ironworking”. Although they couldnt do it in large quantities the common European smith could use it to enhance his iron products[1]

Whereas even the quality of the steel used by the experts in China (even by the 1600s) is questionable. [2]

[1] https://the-orb.arlima.net/encyclop/culture/scitech/iron_ste...

[2] https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_a/advanced/aa...

Bronson and Pigott were a nice read, but it's unclear where Föll is getting most of his conjecture from because they certainly don't talk about it. Frankly, the whole piece smacks of the same Diamond-esque "they made fireworks, we made guns" trope that has been thoroughly torn apart since. Now to his credit, he does claim ignorance at the top of the page, but that seems to be quickly forgotten given how much hyperbole is spewed later on.

[1] is a better lay overview of medieval-era steel-making. And for a great breakdown of forces behind European success in the modern era, see Brett Devereaux's series on EU4 [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5djVkOgu8vs

[2] https://acoup.blog/2021/05/28/collections-teaching-paradox-e...

It reads like Foell was mostly citing Wagner, not B or P. Did you read those?

> a cursory google shows that the mongolian words for steel and iron are similar to the ones in Chinese, my conjecture is that the chinese words are actually loaned from a barbarian culture not the other way round.. (genghis khan probably came from a smithy family btw)

Your conjecture about etymology makes no sense as the Chinese character 鐵 for iron dates back at least to small seal script[1] from a cursory search[2], and small seal script predates Genghis Khan by about 1400 years.

Bronze metallurgy was in China for even longer,[3] pretty sure that was way before there was any meaningful contact with "barbarians".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_seal_script

[2] http://xh.5156edu.com/hzyb/a20196b17789c99815d.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_metallurgy_in_China

Edit: I misread [2]. The character dates back at least to large seal script which is older.

Etymology is almost always speculative but phonetic loans have to be considered separately from typographic history.

There are at least 2 different chinese characters for iron, and the one in common use, the one you mention, has a different old chinese pronunciation (from the turko-mongolic word). The radical for the popular version clues one in to the original non barbarian pronunciation. (Maybe it referred to something else.) The radical for the other one means “barbarian”

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/銕#Chinese

It is not uncommon for chinese characters to be written the same but pronounced differently (and meaning something else) throughout the ages. And for the meaning and pronunciations of different characters to mix or merge

Indeed according to historian David Wagner, “ The evidence presented thus far suggests that iron-smelting techniques developed in the West had by the eighth century BC been brought by nomadic peoples of Central Asia all the way to the Pacific coast, and that these techniques diffused to the smiths of the Chinese states by way of various non-Chinese peoples of the northwest, in what is now Xinjiang. ”

http://donwagner.dk/EARFE/EARFE.html

Thanks for the link to the paper. 8th century BCE is earlier than long before the earliest meaningful contact between China and Central Asia previously known to me, in the form of the Silk Road. And that's two millennia before the Mongols started having written history!

Also wanted to mention that bronze metallurgy is often considered elitist compared to iron metallurgy because 1)tin ores are less abundant 2) techniques are more intricate. Iron tech is pretty much the first mass tech, if zeroth is fire/fermentation or if those were too easy to be considered tech.

Tin requires a supply chain[1], but bronze requires no special technology to create. Refining iron is much more difficult, which is why we had bronze first.

Pottery long predates ironworking. So does agriculture. I'm not sure how you're defining "mass technology", but ironworking isn't the first one.

[1] It's not just tin. Copper has to be sourced from specific locations too.

Bronze: yeah I should have clarified that for bronze i mean the whole bronze business, including making moulds and such. Iron and steel is like photography compared to painting you need less raw skill to be commercially viable once you can get past acquiring the stuff to get started

Mass technology: I was thinking of programming. You have a class of people distinguished by their skill. Sometimes you even have a representative in the pantheon (Wayland)

Pottery and agriculture is “too easy”

Trying to interpret individual radicals of a character as standalone components using their original meaning is enticing, but more often than not incorrect. For example, the character for maternal aunt uses the same radical. Phonetic-semantic compound characters are very, very, common. The standalone pronunciation of 夷 doesn't appear to have turkic/steppe origins either [1].

Moreover, we know Mongolian writing (because of the geopolitics of the time and its status as a younger written tradition) borrowed quite liberally from its southern neighbours. Including, but not limited to, China [2]. So while Wagner's point about proliferation of ironmaking techniques from outside the (nominal) Chinese state at the time makes sense, the whole phonetic angle doesn't.

As for the points about centralization and family name elitism, the first lasted less than 200 years, by which time many formerly aristocratic family names had become _so_ diluted so as to be almost meaningless. One of the main conceits of a major character in RoTK is that he's an average Joe who only gets a modicum of respect for having the same surname as the dynastic family. It also completely ignores the existence of profession-based surnames like 匠 ("artisan", notably 1/2 of 铁匠/blacksmith).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongyi#Yi [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_writing_systems

Notably? I would say “artisan” is too broad and “carpenter” is the usual meaning. the profession based surnames are far from being dominant either compared to smith, which almost always means blacksmith in the west.

While surnames are diluted this kind of “joke” about surnames still exists today, so there is at least some meaning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_family_(Internet_slang)

FWIW according to Baidu wiki the character yi itself has a nomadic origin.

https://baike.baidu.com/item/夷/678050

Also Black, White, Green, Brown, for smiths working with iron, tin, copper, or bronze (https://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Smyth, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9nwm60/why_h...). Those names seem to have multiple origins, but the metal connection explains why most other colours don't have an associated surname.

I think the Portuguese name Ferreiro (iron worker ?!) can be added here. Nice list!

McGowan, if your story needs an Irishman.

here's a map https://i.redd.it/cpndrzuna3f61.png

Stanislav Lem has a story about the attempts to change the history where the Einstein was never born but his theories were developed but

Unapietra, Odnocamenec, Onestone and so on..

John Smith is the stereotypical boring/common name for english speakers, and I was similarly suprised at how many "foreign" names are really just variants of John, so you could have a story in which everyone is called John Smith in different variants (Ivan Kuznets, Juan Herrero, Janek Kawolski, Yahya Haddad, Euan MacGowan etc.)

In French, that would translate to forgeron, but it doesn't seem to be a very common name. On the other hand, boucher (= butcher) and boulanger (= baker) are very common name in France. Kind of interesting that certain profession would become common names in one culture and not in other? Or maybe I'm missing something?

How about ferrier?

To me, Lefèvre is the familiar one, as mentioned in the sibling comment.

Google translate doesn't always produce the "right" name for Smith, I assume because the typical name in many languages was "frozen" prior to modern usage.

I just looked that up, and apparently it's "Lefèvre" that refers to smiths: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lef%C3%A8vre_(patronyme).

Ok, and that and Lefebvre are definitely very very common. Thanks for looking it up.

And both are probably French forms of the article's "Faber"?

(Maker, AIUI, kind of could have been "Faire-ieur" in French? In stead it's related to factor, factory, manufacture etc.)

(Also mentioned above, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421872 )

I'm surprised that the Dutch "Leewendaalder" (Lion Dollar) wasn't mentioned in the discussion. It was a coin of similar size to the 8 reales, also circulating in the 1500s and 1600s. The Dutch presence in what would become New York and other colonies would have been a likely route for the term to enter the colonial vernacular.

Talking about Dutch reminds me of the old commercial saying "uw gulden is hier een daalder waard", translated "your guilder is worth a daler/thaler/dollar here".

I always find it interesting how frequently Dutch is intelligible, knowing German and some basic sound shifts: „Ihr Gulden ist hier einen Thaler wert“

Dutch and Deutsch? I mean it's the same language separated by hundreds of years.

The Spanish piece-of-eight was scored so it could be broken up into up to eight pie-shaped "bits". Two bits made a quarter-dollar.

Thus, "shave and a haircut, two bits", or "knock knock-a-knock-knock, knock-knock".

Sort of.

It was common to cut them in 2-4-8 pieces, but the coins weren't really designed to provide an affordance for it. There are also some areas where the coins were cut into thirds, or the centre punched out, to provide a value that mapped to a useful local unit.

The most common varieties had the Spanish coat of arms on one side, and either the portrait of the monarch, or two globes on the other, depending on date or mint. There were some variations of the coin design where the coat of arms was sized and positioned as a good reference to cut it in four, but the actual lines were raised, so it would actually be one of the harder places to make a cut.

By the by, the old Swedish copper "daler" included a 10 daler coin (plåtmynt) that weighed 44lb!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_riksdaler

>> The thaler was from 17c. the more-or-less standardized coin of northern Germany (as opposed to the southern gulden). It also served as a currency unit in Denmark and Sweden (and later was a unit of the German monetary union of 1857-73 equal to three marks).

In Greek, "taliro" is a five-valued coin (originally a drachma, but nowadays a five Euro note is also a "taliro"; sometimes a 500 Euro or 5k drachma note may also be called a "taliro").

The word is written as τάληρο in the Greek alphabet, with an eta, which is pronounced as "ee" in modern Greek, so the correct transliteration in a Latin alphabet is rather "talero", with an "e".

I wonder then if the root of "talero" is in "thaler".

In Denmark we still have a 'daler'. It's used (probably mostly by people of a certain age) as a nickname for a two kroner coin.

The old rigsdaler was replaced by kroner in 1875, and each Rigsdaler (daler) was worth two kroner.

https://www.nationalbanken.dk/da/om_nationalbanken/historie/... (in Danish)

The Croatian currency "Kuna" was named after the marten (or "kuna" in croatia). Other trivia: the Croatian word "marturina" means "tax".

so, it's just the thal/dollar part, and the neander was a meander in the story

I like this kind of meandering.

have you done 23 and me? sounds like you might have some meanderthal in you

I thought this was going to be a pro-crypto piece

$SAPIEN coin

I thought it was going to be how money moves not only through space but also time.

If there was no inflation then a dollar from 1900 should be just as valuable as a dollar today. However, a dollar is effectively a promise to work. It doesn't store anything. If you bring that dollar into the future it is the same thing as transporting a debt into the future.

Why would it ever make sense for the past to have so much power over the future? I mean the idea that we are obligated to the past makes no sense. If anything the past should be obligated to the future. We work today so that tomorrow is a better day.

A little gem of language history. Quite interesting, even for me as a German who already knew a few things about it.

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