Post by Peter Duncanson [BrE]The currency code BTC is not unique in not being
<two-letter country code><initial of currency name>.
In the last three decades, maybe less, this idea of having
three-letter codes for *everything* has escaped into popular usage.
Formerly confined to people dealing with computer systems like travel
agents and securities brokers, now we see them everywhere.
I suspect the travel industry is to "blame". Flight booking made the
transition from "something you have use a travel agent to do" to
"something you frequently do for yourself online" in the early-to-mid
1990s, at a time when IATA airport codes were the only thing going.
People were already somewhat familiar with the IATA codes if they
traveled at all, from their use on baggage tags, but it was the 1990s
when ordinary people started keying them in themselves, because they
didn't want to spend an extra 5% commission to have an agent book
their flights. This incentivized cities and airports to invest in
branding and marketing initiatives around their IATA codes.
Post by Peter Duncanson [BrE]EUR for the Euro is not EU for the European Union followed by the
initial of the currency name. To fit that pattern it would be EUE.
That's not really the pattern of ISO 4217. However, the ISO 4217
maintenance agency did request the ISO 3166 maintenance agency reserve
the code "EU". The letter added by ISO 4217 is arbitrary, even though
it often does coincide with the first letter of some Latin-alphabet
representation of some name of the currency. You can see this more
clearly in the cases where a country has revalued its currency: the
"new" and "old" units will have different symbols even if the name is
the same. Also consider the countries whose national language does
not use the Latin alphabet -- see, for example,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_(currency)>.
(That's actually a great example for another reason: the ISO 4217
symbol for the currency of the PRC is "CNY", but "yuan" is just a
unit, and the actual currency is "renminbi", which is frequently
rendered as the Latin three-letterism "RMB". In Taiwan, on the other
hand, the currency is the New Taiwan dollar, usually symbolized "NT$",
but the ISO 4217 symbol is "TWD". Thus pattern is repeated with most
of the other "dollar" currencies, where a dollar sign is used in the
press and in edited text generally, with some sort of national
signifier, and the ISO 4217 symbol is relegated to the finance
industry -- "A[us]$", "C[an]$", "NZ$", "US$", etc., or sometimes with
the dollar sign written first.)
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
***@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)
