Question

Before the introduction of the concept of zero was introduced by the Hindu mathemticians, many languages did not account for an absence of something.

Draw a conclusion about the speakers of these languages based on this lexical gap.

Answer 1

Zero as a placeholder was invented independently in civilizations around the world, said Dr. Annette van der Hoek, Indiologist and research coordinator at the Zero Project. The Babylonians got their number system from the Sumerians, the first people in the world to develop a counting system. Developed 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, the Sumerian system was positional the value of a symbol depended on its position relative to other symbols. Robert Kaplan, author of "The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero," suggests that an ancestor to the placeholder zero may have been a pair of angled wedges used to represent an empty number column. However, Charles Seife, author of "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea," disagrees that the wedges represented a placeholder.