Speaking of money

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 87599

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Geoff Bannister"
<gbannister10 at a...> wrote:

> Interesting thought comparing with the Wizarding World, they don't 
> appear to have notes do they? Just the three basic coins. the 
> derivation of their names might be an interesting topic to pursue. 
> Knut is a Scandinian naem - reminds me of our historical King 
> Canute who tried to stop the tide.....

Galleon starts with G for Gold

Sickle starts with S for Silver

Knut starts with K for .... Kopper, I guess, but she always calls 
them 'bronze' Knuts. (I just corrected a typo: transposition of N and
U. Another reference to the Kyprian goddess?)

29 bronze Knuts = 1 silver Sickle. Of course it's a prime number so
that a half-Sickle or third-Sickle won't be an even number of Knuts,
but it's also roughly the number of days in a lunar month. The moon 
is silver colored and some of its phases are sickle-shaped.

She could have chosen the prime number 13 for how many Sickles in a
golden (sun-colored) Galleon, which is (very) roughly the number of
lunar months in a year, and thus the money would be a model of
astronomical cycles. 

She could have driven all money-users even crazier by declaring that
there are 12 and 1/3 Sickles in a Galleon! (In honor of the half-
crown mentioned by Pip!Squeak, 2s 6d. Btw the abbreviation 'd' for 
Old Penny comes from Latin denarius, which is what the penny was
supposed to be worth at the time the abbreviation was invented. From
One-Look, the 1828 Webster's defines 'denarius' as 'four pence. A
day's wage for a common laborer.' The American dime is not named 
after the denarius, but was designed to look like one. 'Dinar' and
'dinero' are words that both evolved from 'denarius'.) 

Alas, she chose a different prime number (and I can never remember 
if it's 17 or 19) for Sickles in a Galleon. If it's 17, at least it 
would echo the age of majority.

Footnotes:
One-Look Dictionary: http://www.onelook.com/index.html

G'rrr, 1828 isn't coming up just now. Here's 1913:
http://machaut.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/WEBSTER.sh?WORD=denarius
"A Roman silver coin of the value of about fourteen cents; the 
'penny' of the New Testament; -- so called from being worth 
originally ten of the pieces called as."

Here is a Bible dictionary:
http://ebible.org/bible/web/glossary.htm#denarius
"A denarius is a silver Roman coin worth about a day's wages for an
agricultural laborer. A denarius was worth 1/25th of a Roman aureus."