Talk:Sestertius signum

I would like to link this to the Wikipedia page for Sestertius but I don't think that interwiki links are working for us. I could use an external link but the interwiki links are so much more elegant. M. Lucretius Agricola

Salve, I have just made a minor change to the coinage page... the original Sestertius Signum coins were minted in bronze rather than brass, so I changed this in the listing. (Marcus Cassius Julianus, Senator)

Thank you, Senator. Information about the original coins is hard to come by. I had guessed brass as it is far more common than bronze. Do you know the actual composition of the coins? There is a certain confusion in naming the copper alloys. For our purposes I take "bronze" to mean copper alloyed primarily with tin and "brass" to mean copper alloyed primarily with zinc. Copper alloyed primarily with nickel would be "cupronickel", which is known sometimes as "German silver", a term that we should at all costs avoid.

"Sestertius signum"

I'm rather unhappy about the phrase "sestertius signum". It looks to me like bad Latin. In Latin you can't simply put two nouns next to each other and make a sort of compound noun, as you can in German or (to some extent) English. There are exceptions, for example one can say "Cicero consul", meaning "the consul Cicero" or "Cicero when he was consul", but note that in that case the two nouns are both of the same gender. "Sestertius", however, is masculine, whereas "signum" is neuter. So I suspect this is an ungrammatical construction.

What's wrong with just "sestertius"? That's what it is.

- Cordus 17:20, 21 June 2007 (CEST)

It was, like so much questionable material, inherited from breezy earlier days when people wrote Latin without actually knowing very much of it. The reasoning seemed to be that we needed a name that clearly identified it as a non-coin (i.e., a token or jeton). I have no idea if there was a S.C. or anything else. If course the object itself says "sestertivs". Agricola 08:55, 22 June 2007 (CEST)

The phrase isn't used in any of the senatus consulta I can find on the subject. Can you think of any reason, in that case, why we should not change all occurences of the phrase "sestertius signum" to "sestertius"?

- Cordus 16:54, 22 June 2007 (CEST)