Zero

Do you ever wonder why the numbers we use are called Arabic numbers? The short answer is that the Arabic numbering system gradually replaced the Roman numeral system in Western Europe during the early medieval period. Can you imagine trying to multiply XXII by XXXVII?
 
Let’s focus on the zero.
 
Before the word zero appeared in English, the word cipher, from the late 14th century, was used to name the arithmetical symbol ‘0’. Cipher came to English from Latin cifra, Arabic sifr (empty, nothing), and Sanskrit sunya-s (empty).
 
The word zero did not appear in English until around 1600. At that time, a zero was “a figure which stands for naught [nothing] in the Arabic notation” and which referred to “the absence of all quantity considered as quantity” (Online Etymological Dictionary). Zero came to English from French zero, Italian zero, Latin zephirum, and Arabic cifr—all from Sanskrit sunya-m meaning an empty place, a desert, nothing, naught (Old English na (no) + wiht (thing) = nawiht).
 
Seemingly, when zero first appeared in English it was not a number but a quality. If zero means ‘nothing’, how did zero become a number meaning something? Is zero even a ‘number’? At this point, we are quickly sliding into philosophy rather than etymology.
 
-o-
 
A bit of background. Just as writing evolved in different ways in different places (e.g., multiple combinations of Chinese characters or the 26-letter A-Z alphabet) so also did numbers evolve in different ways in different places.
 
In early mathematics, zero was used simply as a placeholder; e.g., a 0 determined whether a number is 12 or 102. You can’t do this with Roman numerals; e.g., Roman numeral ‘V’ only ever means 5 whereas the figure 5 has a different value if it is in the number 514 or the number 145.
 
As far as is known, this positional concept of zero emerged in only four places: in Babylon, around 2000 BCE, in China around the beginning of the 1st century CE, and between the 4th and 9th centuries CE in both India and the Mayan civilization of Central America.
 
To quote at length from the Online Etymological Dictionary,
 
“But the next step, the true miracle moment, is to realize that [using zero as a] ‘symbol for nothing’ means that [zero] is not just a place-holder, but an actual number: that ‘empty’ and ‘nothing’ are one … that's when the door blows open and the light blazes forth and numbers come alive. Without that, there's no modern mathematics, no algebra, no modern science.
 
As far as we know, that has only happened once in human history, somewhere in India, in the intellectual flowering under the Gupta Dynasty, about the 6th century C.E. There was no ‘miracle moment,’ of course. It was a long, slow process.
 
Some [Western] authorities, however, put up strong resistance to the [notion] of the Indian origin of modern mathematics. At first, they were mired in the same religion-based worldview that … the number system simply had to be Hebrew in origin, because nothing else would comport with the Bible (so they thought). Later, [this] resistance took refuge in unwillingness to concede cultural superiority to non-Western civilizations.
 
Speculation about a Greek origin of the ten ‘Arabic numerals’ goes back to the 16th century in Europe. But before that, there are many sources in Europe and the pre-Islamic Levant that frankly attribute them to India. The earliest depiction of [Arabic numerals] in English, The Crafte of Nombrynge (c.1350), correctly identifies them as “teen figurys of Inde."
 
I suspect that the Western European merchants and bankers of the time had a great deal of influence in the adoption of the Arabic number system.
 
Reference: Online Etymological Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/
A brief history of zero. https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/zero?old=true
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/listen-the-greatest-numbers-of-all-time-1.6978649
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