Ferdinand I Prager Groschen - Kuttenberg? - 1520-1530, Interesting Variety!

Those darn retrograde O's and I's make this an R11 rarity, now that you mention it.

I'm going to have to be on the look out for these coins, the retrograde letters really stand out. The die cutter must have been in his cups the day he made the die.

That's interesting Dave, you would think by this time in history lettering would be in the right orientation.

The English letters "j" and "w" (to name two) weren't truly more or less standardized in their current familiar forms until well into the 18th c. Prior to that, "uu" stood in for "w" - literally, "double U" - and "i" for "j" (later, somewhat interchangeably, and at times seemingly entirely randomly.) That's probably not a bad thing -- imagine boarding an airplane at the terminal by walking down the ietuuay* (jetway) and trying to discern the pronunciation of the former word as a non-native speaker.

The backwards "N" is a good reminder of just how anthropologically "young" our human written languages are, and it also sheds much light on the state of literacy as we emerged from the Dark Ages.

The number of dies needed must have been extensive -- even striking the good fineness silver from Kutna Hora -- so a die engraver need not be able to read, or write, as long as he could draw and engrave the lines and squiggles that were being asked of him. Even if the die-cutter was literate in one language, there were so many languages mixing together, and so much trade and migration, that it was entirely possible he was cutting dies in a language that was not his own, or even copying coins which had inscriptions in other languages, just like we see with barbarous imitations of Roman coins and their funky letters/odd legends.

Additionally, if the die-cutter was learning to read and write, if the person to whom he was apprenticed had learned to write his "N" backwards, then so would our dutiful apprentice have done, and passed that down the line to his apprentices.

For a slightly off-topic aspect, there has been a good bit of research done as to why children learning to write often reverse their letters "N" and "R" on paper, even when reading from a "correct" text. This sort of research has provided us with a wealth of knowledge about how our brains acquire reading and writing skills and the extent to which the areas of the brain responsible for processing the signals from our eyes (vision) may be one part of the multi-layered neurological puzzle that creates learning and motor skills challenges such as dyslexia and dysgraphia.