How many collectors have had some experience with the phenomenon described in the title? I'm talking about finding yourself becoming familiar with lettering of a foreign language that you've otherwise never studied academically, just by being interested in, and/or collecting coins (and maybe also paper money, stamps, etc.) from countries that primarily speak that language.
Chinese is apparently one of the hardest languages for English-speaking adults to learn as a second language, requiring about 2 whole years of your life (some sources say more) to be proficient in, or so I've read. The hardest part is probably their written language; there's over 5,000 unique characters, some being incredibly complex to write. I'm certainly not fluent in speaking any dialect of Chinese, and probably never will be, but native Chinese speakers I've met (incl. on Numista!), have complimented my recognition of characters as being pretty good for a westerner (how much of this is courtesy I do not know ).
I usually use a website like this to transcribe a character I see on a coin, then use a dictionary function to find out what it means, both when alone and paired with other characters. Context like that is very important; one of the weird things I found out while transcribing a Sapèque from French Indochina, was that the character "法" means "law" alone and in most contexts, but when paired with the word for country, "國" or "国", it means "France". So the literal translation of France in Chinese is "law country", which I am not sure if it has any etymological reasoning. Not just France, either.
I've also seen some folks on the ID forum with amazing knowledge of Arabic script languages, something I've given up on trying to learn (other than basics, like numerals and re-occurring words on coins like "Constantinople", or "Muhammad"), so I'm curious to know about other people's experiences.
When I was cataloguing my Russian and Greek collection, I did learn how to recognize the alphabets so that I could make out what the coins were commemorating. Alas, that was a long time ago and I don’t recognise alot of the alphabets in either language anymore
Well, I learned my numbers in Arabic (and refreshed my memory of numbers in Japanese and Chinese which I had learned some years ago). Thai and Hebrew I still just look up on the Numista page, though.
Thanks to collecting Soviet coins, I recognize about 80% of the cyrillic alphabet. I can also read Arabic and Chinese (and Japanese, which is the same) numbers. Collecting world coins I picked up some foreign words too (like "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" and "Travail, famille, patrie" from French coins).
And I think I know how to say "king" in most European languages.
Lots of people familiar with Cyrillic here. I guess that's the script people used to writing in the Latin alphabet are most familiar with. I've kind of gotten a hold of it; the ones I can remember are that a "P" is a "pi" symbol, and the "R" is the Latin P, and the "N" is the Latin H (as written on Nicholas II's monogram).
That last one I actually first learned when reading Murder on the Orient Express; the Russian émigrée Princess Dragomiroff's lace hankerchief has the "H" initial on it.
Quote: "druzhynets"I'm currently working on that:
Same here, I talked about it on the French forum this week !
- I try to learn the kufic by this way but I need more practice : I can identify some letters easily but I don't differentiate some others and I'm not sure what vowels I should insert to obtain a valid word !
I still need a bit time to read the dates and if the script is too degenerated I'm having a headache !! I learned approximately 20 to 30 other usefull keywords.
- I'm more confortable with the Ottoman Turkish script : I learned numerals and recognize most of the mintnames. Tugrah are still resisting me, but we don't need it when we have the ascension date. Since Mahmud I, most of the coins share the same inscriptions : it's kinda easy to learn the full text. Akce are however a bit harder to decript (really small with part of the inscriptions missing).
- I tryed to learn the pahlavi scripts to decrypt the mintnames and the date on the sassanide coins but I gave up : I just compare the inscriptions now.
- Persian, Urdu, Devanagari script : except numerals and the "Sha", I'm lost here.
The height is I suck in modern arabic script : I prefer the old inscriptions
- I learned some basics ideograms via the cash coin (enough to determine the Qing rulers straight away without having to browse the catalog, and enough to read the numbers). I'm quite familiar with the manchu as well (unfortunately I don't think people are still using this script today !).
- Greek and Cyrillic : I can transliterate the inscriptions in latin script but I only understand few words. I learned how to read the dates in Greek numerals but I didn't practice enough : I don't remember all the letters with their numerals, I still need my file to help me ; same about cyrillic numerals.
- I learned almost all the abbreviations used in latin on the roman coins with their meanings : I was suprised to be able to read and understand the full inscriptions on a roman milestone and some other on monuments this summer. I never learned latin at school so i guess my pronunciation is far from perfect.
- I decript the paleohispanic inscriptions on a coin once, but I needed a document for that. Now, I know how those alphabets works but I can do nothing without an equivalency table (the scripts are too close and different of the futhark : it's confusing).
Quote: "CassTaylor"I usually use a website like this to transcribe a character I see on a coin, then use a dictionary function to find out what it means, both when alone and paired with other characters. Context like that is very important; one of the weird things I found out while transcribing a Sapèque from French Indochina, was that the character "法" means "law" alone and in most contexts, but when paired with the word for country, "國" or "国", it means "France". So the literal translation of France in Chinese is "law country", which I am not sure if it has any etymological reasoning. Not just France, either.
Well, that is interesting! Chinese works both in a definitive way and a phonetic way. Due to the extremely many homonyms [same-sounding words], there can be many different characters that match together and create the exact same translation. Therefore, we have to choose from the matches that sound similar to the original one AND have a positive meaning. The character set that usually gets chosen are the virtues, character traits, simple letters and positive words. 法 is pronounced 'fa' [like France] and, by chance, France happens to be one of the countries (usually politically significant ones) where we choose to use a 國 to end instead of the full name. The full name is 法蘭西共和國 [Fa-lan-xi, France] meaning 'the west of the [place with] law and orchids [the flower of bravery, positive]'. It does not actually correlate directly with the traits of a country, but we try to give it a better name so we can refer to it politely. Similarly, 英國 is 'Ying-guo' for 'England' to symbolise bravery.
Very confusing!
Best regards,
SRL
TL;DR: The name of the country is not a direct description of the country's traits itself. It is just that to refer to them in a more polite way, we use characters with positive meanings to phoneticize the initial pronunciation. And the characters with positive meanings themselves have an initial meaning, too.
Greetings,
Despite only being a year into numismatics, I can say I am already gaining some foreign language knowledge in several foreign languages, including:
- Some French terminology with all the coins, history and translation
- Cyrillic script through Russian coins [and Soviet songs], some terminology learnt.
- Korean script.
- Seal script and all sorts of old Chinese scripts are easier to identify, despite being very hard.
I started to learn cyrillic after receiving Eastern Europe coins in my first swap.
After 2 years of collecting I can understand almost all the cyrillic letters, part of the greek letters (knowing greek helps a little in knowing cyrillic and vice-versa), and the arabic and japanese numbers.
Quote: "Cycnos"- I learned some basics ideograms via the cash coin (enough to determine the Qing rulers straight away without having to browse the catalog, and enough to read the numbers). I'm quite familiar with the manchu as well (unfortunately I don't think people are still using this script today !).
Yep, that's how I started out with cash coins as well!
Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese cash coins up until the mid 19th century/early 20th century for the latter two, also use Chinese characters, with Hangul only coming in on Korean coins in the last decades of the 19th century, alongside Chinese; and it took until the post-WWII states for Hangul to be used solely on coins of both North and South Korea.
Chinese ideograms on Vietnamese cash (called Sapèques, circulated alongside French Indochinese currency at the rate of 1000 cash = 1 Piastre (or "Tael")) continued until 1945, when the last Nguyen Emperor, Bao Dai abdicated.
The Japanese westernised their coinage around the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, but all their issued coins continued to use the "Kanji" or Chinese characters, rather than Hirogana. Being familiar with Chinese characters is also a door into reading Kanji, but Hirogana is Greek to me.
I collect Europe coinage, and because I learnt Russian, Latin and German at school, my possibilities are limited. I nevertheless picked up some French words, mainly from managing french side of Numista and I learned to read Greek.
(But latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets are so similar in fact, just rotate them or use a mirror and you shall see most letters match up.)
Chinese/Japanese characters are really interesting. Like SRL said, sometimes names are constructed phonetically but the characters to match the sounds are chosen with certain meanings in mind.
When I was in my 20s I was very interested in Japanese comics, and learned a fair bit of Japanese in order to read some series that had not been translated into English yet. In Japanese most of the borrowed Chinese characters have both a Chinese pronunciation and a Japanese pronunciation, and one thing that is done quite commonly with made up names in comics is to create a sort of "hidden pun" based on the alternate pronunciation of a name or word. This is almost always completely untranslatable into English except perhaps by a footnote to explain the joke!
Quote: "Jesse11"Chinese/Japanese characters are really interesting. Like SRL said, sometimes names are constructed phonetically but the characters to match the sounds are chosen with certain meanings in mind.
When I was in my 20s I was very interested in Japanese comics, and learned a fair bit of Japanese in order to read some series that had not been translated into English yet. In Japanese most of the borrowed Chinese characters have both a Chinese pronunciation and a Japanese pronunciation, and one thing that is done quite commonly with made up names in comics is to create a sort of "hidden pun" based on the alternate pronunciation of a name or word. This is almost always completely untranslatable into English except perhaps by a footnote to explain the joke!
I know what is going on, but cannot find any examples! What are some humorous names?
Quote: "Jarcek"(But latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets are so similar in fact, just rotate them or use a mirror and you shall see most letters match up.)
To my eyes, Cyrillic and Greek are almost the same; although I am sure a native, literate speaker of a language that uses either script regularly would say differently.
My last school in the UK had a Classics course, essentially Greek/Latin. Thankfully it wasn't compulsory, although I wonder if any other country so regularly teaches their schoolchildren a dead language.
This is also apparently my 5000th post!
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Not just France, either.
