Talk:Rial
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You say there is "no official symbol" for the currency, but if there is an ISIRI standard which specifies a specific code position for the name of the currency, then surely that is the official symbol? And if there is no toman but the word is used by people today, what do they mean when they say it? Evertype 15:52, 2004 Jun 20 (UTC)
[edit] RIYAL (Arab) and REAL (Spanish)
Question: Is there a direct relation between the words RIYAL (Arab) and REAL (Spanish)? They both seem suspiciously similar and denote the same concept: "Money". The "Real Academia Española" dictionary states that the roots of the Spanish words are Latin REI and REGALIS (similar to "Royal" in English and "Roi" in French).
My hypothesis is this: Since the Spanish peninsula was dominated by Arab powers for 700 years, perhaps the Arabs took back home the Spanish name for money. But this seems unlikely to me as the influence usually works the other way around: Spanish was the language absorbing Arab words.
I am thinking that it was the Spaniards who adopted the word "RIYAL" from Arabic an misspelled it as the more familiar sounding "REAL". Since Spanish galleons were sailing the seas full of "Reales", the word stuck, though not nearly as much as "Peso" for which even the dollar owes its origins to as a corruption of the letters "P" and "S" written closely together, but that´s another story... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.109.12.126 (talk • contribs) 14:43, 27 April 2007
