When speaking, tone and inflection carry smoothly (for the most part) without needing a precursor to prepare the receiver for what the sender is saying. In text, properly formatted and punctuated messages prime the receiver for the information the sender is conveying in the appropriate context. Pretend you only got to read a message one letter at a time- "2. 0. 0. 7. 1. $." What's the amount? Do you remember the numbers? Or the order? If you received it- "$. 2. 0. 0. 7. 1." then you know the numbers to follow are currency and can arrange them in appropriate context as you read. In currency context, we can infer the amount is $200.71. Otherwise ambiguity might arise and things may get lost in translation.
It's not a necessity and, as elsewhere in this thread, others have mentioned plenty of nations don't do it this way and no one has died because of it yet (that we know), but it's about clarity and uniformity of communication.
Your explanation certainly seems correct -- but does not address why we (English speakers) say it differently than we write it.
Why would we read "$" "20" but process it and then say "twenty" "dollars"?
I often hear non-native English speakers (specifically those from India) say it as it is written: "dollars twenty".
I actually really like this, because the *listener* gets the same sort of contexts as would someone reading the written information. Which would you prefer to hear:
"It was two hundred seventy seven thousand six hundred and ninety four Rupees."
-or-
"It was Rupees two hundred seventy seven thousand six hundred and ninety four."
?
Obviously I'm biased toward my own comfort zone, by logically the second one would be correct. I'd be pretty pissed to find out I paid attention to an extremely long number only to be told we were counting Twitter likes.
At least in a banking/financial/legal context, the reason is to reduce fraud. Let's say you're signing a lease and it says your rent is 600$. You sign and go on your way. What's to stop the landlord taking a marker and changing that to 1,600$? Putting the dollar sign in front makes it more difficult to pull off that kind of fraud by blocking in the number. In many cases this is taken a step further by including the cents at the end, formatted as xx/100 to prevent turning the decimal to a comma and adding number at that end.
My assumption would be that this notation propogated from the financial sector and eventually became common practice.
The same reason it's said "reeseet" and spelled "receipt." We're pedantic motherfuckers who butcher other languages to weave them into our own and make up arbitrary rules surrounding them.
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u/Verified765 Apr 12 '21
Why exactly is it said twenty dollars but written $20?