Nigeria: decimal and pre-decimal variations

[chrisild]

The same question for the next denomination: kobo or kobos?

In English and a few other languages you usually append a plural-s while in others you usually don't. (I know you add the s to the plural of euro for some reason, but I don't think you do that with the yen for example.) So I think it was similar here - in some languages spoken in Nigeria the plural would be different from the singular. Solution: use the same word on all coins.   Same thing with "naira".

Thanks for digging those designs up! I suppose that, as you wrote, the central hole was a reference to the earlier (British West Africa) coinage ...

Christian

[<k>]

I was actually just restoring a very old topic, ruined by Photobucket, and spacing it out somewhat more neatly. Glad you enjoyed it, though.

The "s" plural in European languages in interesting. It's found in Spanish, in French (though usually not pronounced), and even in Dutch: appel / appels. I suspect that in English, words ending in a vowel tend to attract an S in the plural - especially when the word is of foreign origin and not in everyday use, nor referring to objects commonly found in the Anglosphere.

I understand that there was a world shortage of holes at the time that these Nigerian coins were first minted.