2012-05-23 20:40, Doug Ewell wrote:
The U.S. dollar, British pound, Japanese yen, etc. did not achieve stability and widespread acceptance because they had special symbols. Instead, the special symbols are widely recognized because they are associated with currencies known to be stable and widely accepted.
Quite right, though perhaps we should emphasize the “widely accepted” part more than stability.
It is a common fallacy these days to think that you can create brands simply by creating symbols for them. But this symbolistic fallacy is just one part of human behavior that creates new characters.
Note also that the German mark was pretty much always just "DM"
Well, looking at my stamp collection, I can see old German stamps with symbols that look like script-style “m” (with the height of digits) and script-style “M”.
Yucca
