Company law

The seventh entry is l’apport non numéraire, and its last word repays a minute, because English owns the very same word and puts it to quite another use. Behind it stands Latin numerus, a number, and from that numerarius, the clerk who counted out the money in a late Roman office. French kept the counting and dropped the clerk: le numéraire is coin and note, money in its physical form, so payer en numéraire is to pay cash and un apport en numéraire is a cash contribution to a company. This entry is its negative — the building, the patent, the machine, everything that has to be valued before it can count as capital. English took the French noun over in the nineteenth century, but only into economics, where « the numeraire » is the good whose price is fixed at one so that every other price can be stated against it. That is a unit of account, which is very nearly the opposite of a pile of banknotes. Read non numéraire as « non-numeraire » and a plain contribution in kind becomes a piece of price theory.