Can you imagine the world without the concept of zero? Try it. How would Candy Crush say about the number of lives you’ve got when you’ve exhausted all of them? How would teachers disappoint us in exams? Or how would you express the amount of money you want to spend on purchasing Tahir Shah’s album?
Zero
Can you imagine the world without the concept of zero? Try it. How would Candy Crush say about the number of lives you’ve got when you’ve exhausted all of them? How would teachers disappoint us in exams? Or how would you express the amount of money you want to spend on purchasing Tahir Shah’s album? Okay, rhetoric aside, zero is a very important number to us today. But why is its etymology so important that I preferred doing an article on it and not on any other number? The reason is that the English word “zero” is linguistically very interesting.
English belongs to the Germanic language family, which means that there used to be a language in some point in time from which English, as we know today, emerged. Some of the other languages that emerged from the same proto language are German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and Afrikaans. So basically, there was a Proto-Germanic language once spoken by certain people who then decided to part ways and stopped seeing each other. In centuries, their descendants spoke languages that differed so much from each other that they had to hire translators to communicate, and hence started the translation business. Sorry, yeah, the languages! So well, even though the new tongues differed from each other, they still had some similarities in basic vocabulary like major relations (father, mother, sister, brother, son, daughter), names of animals and... numbers! So a very good litmus test for checking whether two languages belong to the same family is to see what they call their basic numbers, one to ten. English, being a Germanic language, shares this feature with German, whose counting from one to ten is: eins, zwei, drei, vier, funf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun and zehn. But interestingly, when it comes to Zero, things get tricky. Zero in German is “null” (nowhere close to English “zero”).
You may notice the same phenomenon in Urdu and Hindi. All numbers are called same, except for zero. But that’s for another issue. In English, the story of how zero made its way there takes us to Ancient India where the concept of zero was introduced (although some historians believe that their counting system was inspired by the Babylonians - who in turn took it from the Sumerians. It’s a vicious circle, yeah). They used to call it in Sanskrit as shunya. When Arab scholars got their hands on Indian texts, they adopted the idea, but used a word that was already common in Arabic for “nothing”: sifr. The word traveled to Europe and was altered from sift to safira, to zefiro, to zevero and then finally zéro in French.
When the French captured England in 11th Century in what is popularly known as the Norman Conquest, they did not only bring their toasts and fries, they also brought their language. As French belongs to a different language family - the Romance Languages, which have Latin as a direct ancestor - the words were new to the general English people. However, the French did not care and used their language as the aristocratic language. This is where zero, among other almost 30 percent of today’s English vocabulary, got the chance to seep into English. The basic vocabulary and sentence structure, however, did not change and that is what sets English apart from Romance Languages.
Interestingly, the term for zero in all Romance Languages are identical to zero. French: zero; Italian: zero; Spanish: cero; Portuguese: zero; Romanian: zero; Catalan: zero. And the list goes on and on. So, whether it was Indians who introduced zero, the Mayans, or the Sumerians, the fact is that it is now here.
