When money is worthless
QUESTION What is the highest denomination banknote a country has ever produced?
If a country undergoes hyper-inflation, currencies might devalue in a short time and the government might continue to print out large denomination bills to compensate, sometimes in the millions, billions and trillions.
Brazil and austria have produced 500,000 cruzeiro real and kronen notes. argentina and Georgia had one million peso and laris notes. Peru once printed a five million intis bill, and Bolivia printed a ten million peso bill.
The axis-occupied Greece printed a 100 billion drachma bill. as Yugoslavia was dissolving, it printed 500 billion dinar notes. Weimar Germany printed billion mark notes and Zimbabwe had 100 trillion dollar bills in 2009.
The world’s worst case of hyper-inflation was in post-war Hungary. In 1944, as the country became a battleground between Russia and Germany, Hungary’s industrial capacity was destroyed. Transportation was difficult because most of the rail lines and locomotives were destroyed.
after the war, with no tax base to rely on, the Hungarian government decided to stimulate the economy by printing money, but this rapidly got out of hand. During this time, 100 quintillion — a one followed by 20 zeros — pengo bill was issued.
Hungary introduced its new currency, the forint, in 1946 and a famous photograph showed a road sweeper brushing large pengo bills into the sewer. One new forint was exchangeable for 400 octillion (4 x 10 to the power 29) pengo.
Mark D. Wright, Southampton.
QUESTION What is the largest theatre cast ever assembled?
In THe Thirties, my mother was a chorus girl and actress. In 1937, she was appearing in a play called The Gusher at the Princes Theatre, London, now renamed the Shaftesbury. It was one of the first theatres to have a revolving stage.
a review in the Daily express on august 2, 1937, stated that at one point there were 147 people on stage. a similar review in The Daily Telegraph gave the same figure, adding that ‘it looked more like 2,000’. for a play, as against a musical, this was a huge cast.
Incidentally, several younger members of the ensemble went on to become household names, including alastair Sim ( St Trinian’s), Joan Hickson ( Miss Marple), and Bernard Lee ( James Bond’s ‘M’).
In contrast, the 1994 Hal Prince revival of Show Boat had 60 members in the cast. The original production of 42nd Street had 54 in the cast, plus four swings (understudies) and a standby.
Colin S. Clark, Newbury, Berks.
QUESTION Is it true that one language of the world dies out every fortnight? Which ones have died recently?
a LanGuaGe disappears when its speakers disappear or when they take to speaking another language, most often one used by a more powerful group.
Increased migration and rapid urbanisation has often resulted in the loss of traditional ways of life and a strong pressure to speak a dominant language that is — or is perceived to be — necessary for full civic participation and economic advancement.
Language loss has resulted in warnings that half of the estimated 7,000 languages still spoken around the world will disappear by the end of this century and that every two weeks a language dies.
Hard evidence from The Catalogue Of endangered Languages shows that while there is a major problem, it is not as extreme as has been claimed. Currently, 3,054 languages are endangered (43 per cent of the total), based on precise criteria.
Of all known named languages, 634 have become extinct, 141 of these (22 per cent) in the past 40 years.
The catalogue demonstrates that as of the 21st century, an average of 3.5 languages become extinct per year, i.e. about one each four months.
Three languages went extinct during 2016. Two were native american dialects: Mandan, a Siouan dialect from north Dakota, with the death of Dr edwin Benson on December 9; and Wichita, a Caddoan dialect from Oklahoma with the death of Doris McLemore on august 30.
The third language that went extinct last year was Gugu Thaypan, an aboriginal language from Queensland of the Pama–nyungan family, with the death of Tommy George on July 29.
The last language to go extinct in the British isles was the Cromarty dialect of north northern Scots. The last native speaker of the dialect, Bobby Hogg, died in 2012 at the age of 92.
James Murray, Edinburgh.
QUESTION The lady who invented the fidget spinner allowed her patent to expire and missed out on a fortune. Has a similar situation happened before?
fuRTHeR to earlier answers, one of the great altruistic acts of modern times was Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s donation of the World Wide Web to humanity.
The world’s first website was launched at CeRn, the european Organisation for nuclear Research, in 1991, and from there the web as we know it today developed. But Berners-Lee did not put a patent on his idea, so was not due any royalties. He decided that his invention should be freely available. Keith Sutton, Stoke.
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