sweden does something similarly weird. we don’t have a currency symbol (unless you count “kr”) so the standard way to write a price is “20:-”, which used to be “20kr, 0öre”, with the colon as the decimal separator and the line added so you couldn’t write in another value, but then we switched decimal separator for currency to “,” and “:-” just became the symbol for “money”.
you even occasionally see abominations like “19,90:-”…
sweden does something similarly weird. we don’t have a currency symbol (unless you count “kr”) so the standard way to write a price is “20:-”, which used to be “20kr, 0öre”, with the colon as the decimal separator and the line added so you couldn’t write in another value, but then we switched decimal separator for currency to “,” and “:-” just became the symbol for “money”.
you even occasionally see abominations like “19,90:-”…
It’s interesting that you have :- as the symbol for money when here :- is the symbol for forgetting to give your ASCII smiley a mouth. :-)
We also sometimes use ,- effectively as a symbol for money. I assume it has same origin, would be used as 19,90 ,- too.
Thouhg I think you’d only use it on handwritten stuff, didn’t see it in the wild for a long time now that I think about it