Hi

I know the condition is pretty bad. Still, I'm posting it in the hope that someone would identify it for me.

The picture is fuzzy and the coin is worn (also upsidedown), but looks like a Michail Fedorovich Romanov kopeek to me.

The obverse of your coin should be more closely examined than is possible from the somewhat blurry image of yours. The mintmark appears to be situated half way outside the flan, MOC (KBA). However, what I can make of this is a Moscow kopeck from Mihail Fedorovich, Grishin-Kleshchinov 340, Melnikova 3-9, which is a more common coin of this reign. Interestug, that the first letters of the second line ЛI have already disappeared, a process which can be followed when this reverse die was contineously used with the following obverse (Grishin-Kleshchinov 404, Melnikova 9-9).

By the way, your reverse is upside down.

Thanks!

Sorry about the poor quality of the pictures. Unfortunately, this is the best I can mange right now under artificial lighting. I will replace these with better photographs this weekend. For now, I have corrected the position of the reverse.

You have not corrected the position of the coin, but you have turned it into a mirror image

These coins clearly are not your field of expertise.

If I had some coins I knew nothing about, say an old Nepalese coin or maybe a Chinese cash coin to show, trying to get it in correct orientation would be a wild guess for me.

Designs on such coins just look like squiggles to me. No doubt my efforts would appear quite ridiculous to anyone who actually knew anything about those coins.

Also, in some languages, the words "upside down" and "inside out" are interchangeable.
I had a friend in Morocco who could never get it right.

Maya, language can be very interesting. I have met many people from the Philippines. One of the things that always struck me as very odd was the way they would refer to a person as "he" in one sentence and "she" in the next (almost as if the pronouns were interchangeable) when speaking in English.

I found the following explanation for that here:

"Tagalog pronouns do not encode gender. 'He' and 'she' are both expressed with siya. Gender, however, is encoded in some nouns: ate 'older sister' vs. kuya 'older brother'. You may have noticed your Tagalog friends mixing genders every now and then when referring to the same person. Be assured that this does not influence their ability to distinguish gender in the natural world."

So I guess since both "he" and "she" are the same word ("siya") in Tagalog, using them as synonymous in English makes sense in a strange sort of way.

Actually, sounds to me like Tagalog is a very progressive language: it is very easy to write and speak in a politically correct way, genderwise.

I know a very nice old Romanian doctor who doesn't seem to use gender at all when speaking in English. I've heard him say "The patient...how is it?"

Russian coins are not my area and my Russian is about as good as Stalin's Sanskrit! Nevertheless, I do sometimes pick up coins I don't know anything about, provided I get them REALLY cheap. I thought flipping the image vertically would take care of the fact that it was 'upside down'. Here is the image I had posted initially.



About how much do I need to rotate it so that the alignment is correct (say, X degrees clockwise or anticlockwise)?

I'll correct the orientation when I replace the images this weekend. Till then, all are requested to arrange themselves (or their monitors, whichever is more convenient) such that the alignment of the coin appears correct

On second thought, Stalin may have known some Sanskrit...

I'm sure he knew some Georgian, since that was where he came from ... when I hold text written in Georgian upside-down, it looks a little like Sanskrit to me!

Flip vertical, and then horizontal.

Upside down means the coin has to be turned 180 degrees and nothing else.

As I think the coin has already been attributed right and has no particular commercial value there is no longer a need to correct anything. But I think studying a little bit further is no bad idea, after a few years of intensive study the coins start to fall in a correct position by themselves.