Is the word “Euro” capitalised? It’s not spelt that way in our local papers…
sailor, what you’re referring to is the ‘symbol’ for the unit, not the name. Yes, ‘km’ never takes an s, but the word ‘kilometre’ does in English. Likewise, the euro symbol (that € thing that I don’t have on my keyboard) doesn’t take an s, but the word should in English.
The 2c coin I have here says (roughly):
2 EURO
CENT
I took this to mean “Cent of the euro variety” rather than the word “eurocent”.
Re the pluralization, I’d say that the problem (or rather the solution) is that most languages pluralize differently.
Adding an ‘s’ in English is achieved by adding -er in several Germanic languages, or ending with -a in several latin-based ones.
Then there is all sorts of fluffing about with word gender which affects how it is used in speech.
Anyway, by declaring the Euro a natural plural (or whatever it is that fish and sheep are) multi-lingual transactions are much less likely to cause confusion with those extra particles of speech getting stuck in the works.
V.clever.
In Greece, the word ‘cent’ is recognised, but officially they are allowed to use ‘lepta’ - which is a long-dead term that used to be used for fractions of Drachma. (imagine! 1 EU=356 Dx )
Um, actually ‘lepta’ (a plural) is also used for ‘minute’ and hence just means ‘fraction’.
I have noticed that prices in cents everywhere are written as a decimal:
0.55 EU
0.06 EU (an advertised phone rate)
instead of the more familiar (to me)
55c
… its meaning is clear, so I call it progress. It certainly travels bettter, and takes the importance away from what a ‘cent’ is called.
Back to EU.
I’ve heard the word used in diminuative - Euraki , but that is apparently bad grammer. A gender-neutral foreign word should not be modified using local speech patterns - but who listens to grammarians?
And the last word on Greek Euro - It’s not pronounced that way!!
Seing as ‘Europe’ is in fact a Greek word, the Greeks pronounce it with the native inflection - However the vowel blend ‘eu’ represents the sound ‘ev’.
So, despite the attempts to make sure everyone will be talking about the same thing - a tourist in Greece will be bamboozled hearing about ‘evro’ the first few times!:smack:
In America, both methods are used for writing cents, which can lead to a lot of confusion. All too frequently, you’ll see something like a coupon for a Big Mac for “.99¢”, which would literally mean “A little less than one cent”, instead of “99¢” or “$.99”, which would be “A little less than a dollar” (which I presume was the intended meaning).
So yeah, I’d agree that a uniform and consistent way of writing such quantities would be progress.