[seanhunter]

I used to work in finance, and there is a bunch of obscure terminology and conventions, adopted from different cultures (eg you can trade a "Lakh" of silver).

See how the currency sign for GBP looks like a capital L? and the currency sign for shillings and pence was "s" and "d"? (now the uk use "p" for pence since decimalisation). So "Lire", "Soldi" and "Denarii" were the denominations of Italian currency in the the late Renaissance, and this obscure terminology was because originally the bankers in London were from Lombardy.

So I always thought MM was the same. For something like "Mille Mille" (ie one thousand thousands). I don't have any reference for this, that was just my own theory, and it's slightly undermined by the fact that the Italians have a word for "Million" ("Milione").

[toyg]

Loads of Latin and Italian words were modified across the world, not unlike what happens today with English; it's perfectly possible that accountants trading predominantly in the New World or some other remote area could have come up with their own approximation for a word (milione) that is not from Classic Latin and is actually pretty recent (wikipedia says XIII to XIV century, whereas lira and soldo are much older and denario goes all the way back to Rome fighting Carthage).

[vram22]

Ha, interesting. Didn't know about soldi. Coincidentally, had blogged (as an aside to my main post topic) about denarii recently. Here's what one looked like:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/07/the-many-uses-of-randomnes...

[vram22]

Good point. Yes, lakh (sometimes spelled lac) in English is from the Hindi word laakh, which I think is from Sanskrit laksha. (Many Indian languages are descended from or influenced by Sanskrit.)

[AjithAntony]

For anyone who is about to google this, a lakh is 100,000