Oldest Coins With A Current Language

http://www.librarius.com/cantales.htm

Chaucer's English differs from modern English to the extent that Canterbury Tales is nearly incomprehensible without extensive footnotes or an extensive knowledge of the vocabulary of those days. I had always learned in school that it was both one of the terminal works of Middle English, and the first works of (very) Early Modern English.

At any rate, by "comprehend" I mean that any literate child can pick up an old US coin and read "United States of America" and the denomination, but "VICTORIA D:G: BRITT:REG:F:D" is Latin, not English.

I'm gonna go with Kufic script, which is still used today (such as on the flag of Iran).


From wikipedia:

Are there ancient coins in Hebrew? I would think that is one of the languages with the most direct connections to ancient times.

The Greek used on ancient Greek coins is, essentially, the same as Greek spoken in Greece today. While the Greek vernacular is modified slightly from region to region, the "officially taught" Greek is the same classical Greek as appears on the coins. This "officially taught" Greek is also the one you're likely to find on the evening news. By analogy, it would be as if everyone on the television in America, Britain or Australia spoke in King James / Shakespearean English.

So a Greek child, even if they may not speak quite the same language at home, they should nevertheless be able to easily "read" what a typical ancient Greek coin says.


You are forgetting the Commonwealth period (1649-1657), when England was ruled by Puritans and all things Latin were deemed too Catholic and unfit for public use. Coins of the Commonwealth period are entirely in English, with "The Commonwealth of England" on one side and "God with us" on the other; the only "un-modern" feature of this inscription is the use of the letter "V" for "U" (GOD WITH VS). NGC database page for the Commonwealth shilling.

After the restoration of the monarchy, the English language did not reappear on English or British coins until the word "farthing" appeared on a farthing in 1799.

Chinese: yes, the Chinese script used on post-wu-zhu coins should be easily readable by anyone in China.

Arabic: while the language is changed little, the way of writing it has changed a couple of times. Few modern Arabic-speakers can read Kufic script; it's not entirely unlike the typical modern English-speaker's difficulty trying to read words written in blackletter or "Gothic" fonts like Fraktur; even if the words are entirely ordinary, the script used to write them is alien to their experience.

I don't know enough about Chinese to know when it stops being "recognizable". Here are a few of the major types to show the evolution:

(Internet photos; I don't own half of these and wanted to illustrate the writing more clearly than an affordable example could)

Spade money - 600-200 BC



Ban Liang 220-118 BC


Wu Zhu 118 BC - 618 AD


Wang Mang 9-23 AD


Tang dynasty (Li Yuan) 618 AD



These are all the same language, but I don't know well enough to tell if a Wang Mang coin would be like reading English in cursive, or blackletter, or Runic. The Li Yuan obviously is exactly the same script that was used up until 1912 and then on modern coins.

The problem with Russian coins is not as much the language itself as 1) the 1918 orthography reform (though a 5th grader would probably know of that), 2) the occasional abbreviations (a common example is KNS or KNZ for "kniaz"), 3) words running together (no spaces) and line breaks in weird places, 4) unusual letter shapes (and/or some letters that aren't used anymore, though that partly falls under the "1918 reform" clause), and 5) small flans, so it's almost impossible to find a coin with a full legend.
The language itself didn't actually change that much.

With that in mind, something like this denga from the early 1540s should probably be recognizable, if only because the lines correspond exactly to words:

KNSb BE/|IKI IBAN ~= "Kniaz veliki Ivan" ~= "Great Prince Ivan" (IV the Terrible, as it happens).

I don't know enough about pre-unification (14th-15th century) coin legends to say which ones would be recognizable; again, in practice, most of them would never actually appear on a coin fully.