iad58 | In varietate (?) concordia (Reply)

A very confused issue is making the news this morning. The minister of state administration of Bulgaria is going to Brussels, together with a team of experts (?), there to argue in favour of the € being called евро in Bulgarian. Apparently the European Central Bank, or maybe some other EU body, wants it to be written еуро, for uniformity's sake. (They don't seem to care how it's pronounced, since in that there's no uniformity even in the relatively narrow area of Western Europe where the € was invented.)

Why should such a thing as a bank have a say in what's called what in any language, one wonders? And why should anyone from outside presume to tell the Bulgarian language what to call anything?

Apparently several EU countries (or, should we say, their official languages) have already been harassed into compliance. The EU wants all names of the € to be spelt euro, and it also wants them not to inflect (1 euro, 10 euro), so that the design of the € currency can be kept simple.

Even so, if the word is written in Bulgarian on the notes, it's going to look different from the two that are already there, viz., EURO and ΕΥΡΩ. What difference does it make whether the third one is ЕУРО or ЕВРО?

Not to mention that this urge towards uniformity and simplicity has placed several European countries in the idiotic situation of having a national currency which doesn't really have a name in the national language.

They probably don't know in Brussels that Soviet notes bore their face value in 15 languages, in four different scripts, and with full respect for each language's grammar. And the 15 names of the currency, far from being the same, weren't even all related to one another. This is what I call unity in diversity.

Learn, you fools.