How Far Back Can We Go? Second Edition! Ended At 1492 Waiting On 1491

A lowly cent.. just a single leaf from the mighty copper maple tree:

1938 CANADA one cent; mintage= ~18.3 mil.:

For 1938, all I have is this lowly kopéyka. Certain Slavic languages have gnarly rules of pluralization, almost as bad as the untenable geese/moose situation in English: you would know this coin as "one kopek", but this is just shielding you from the awful truth. One kopek, by itself, is one kopéyka. Get two together (or three) and they become two/three kopéyki. But as soon as you get to five... they become five kopeek! That's because Russian plurals are awful. There's one for numbers that are 1, or end with one (so [1] ruble and [11] rubles are the same in Russian), one for numbers ending in 2, 3, or 4 (except for 12, 13, or 14, but 22 and 32 would be included), and one for numbers ending in the other digits. Nobody knows why this is, but it's painful to learn.

Soviet coins are impressively utilitarian, so there's not much to say about the design itself. However, as more S.S.R.s were incorporated, the number of banners draped around the wheat ears increased. This is because each banner has a small rendition of the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" in each official language of the U.S.S.R. - so these banners do not reflect the increasing ethnic or national diversity of the U.S.S.R., but rather the increasing linguistic diversity. In 1936 I'll show you the version with many fewer banners.

I'm learning Russian and I too find it a strange language in certain ways. when the word for '40' does not follow the pattern of the others in the series of 10's. how does tree-tsat become a sohrak then a peet dee syaht or something like that? haha but its a fascinating language at the same time.

1938 Walking Liberty half Dollar

And this smoothly goes into my entry for 1937. The accession of King George VI to the British Throne meant all kinds of coin design changes across the British Empire... so I'm going to throw all that out the window to post this Swedish krona. The design is a real winner, and it's toned up nicely too.

My Great Britain King George VI first-year circulation set is a work in progress. (I wanted to squeeze all these into one image, but I had some trouble with it)







This is the last day we'll be seeing anymore of good ol' Bertie.

1937