Speso
Speso (from French "espèce" ( currency )) was the project of a currency unit that was used by Esperanto circles as a unit of account.
history
The currency was conceived by René de Saussure in 1907 to facilitate communication in the (multinational) Esperanto community and was used on a small scale by British and Swiss banks until the First World War . A corresponding concept was the Stelo from 1945 to 1993 .
units
The currency was based on the decimal system, whereby normally not the Speso but the Spesmilo (1000 Speso, abbreviation: Sm ) is taken as the starting value:
1 Spesmilo = 10 Spescentoj = 100 Spesdekoj = 1000 Spesoj
value
1 Spesmilo was worth 0.733 grams of gold, ½ dollars, 2.50 francs, or one ruble .
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Spesmilo sign
The Spesmilo sign, a monogram made up of a capital S and a small M, was mainly used as a signet. In the running text, the Spesmilo is simply abbreviated with "Sm". It is included in the Unicode standard as a currency symbol .
Ĉekbanko Esperantista
Herbert Hoveler (1859–1918), a German banker and Esperantist who emigrated to London, was the main promoter of the idea of Speso. In 1907 he founded the Ĉekbanko Esperantista to enforce the currency . The bank issued checks on Speso that were printed with the motto Unu mondo, unu lingvo, unu mono (one world, one language, one currency "). A total of 730 bank customers were counted in 43 countries. 1918 also ended with Hoveler's death the currency.
Web links
- Streboj al internacia mono. In: Eventoj. No. 50, January 1994. (in Esperanto)
Individual evidence
- ^ Esperanto and the Dream of a World Currency. In: Australasian Coin & Banknote Magazine. September 2005 (online)
- ^ Linguistic Money. In: Mikael Parkvall: Limits of Language. 2008, ISBN 978-1-59028-198-7 , p. 381.