WEBVTT

00:00:06.337 --> 00:00:08.693
Mysteries of vernacular:

00:00:08.693 --> 00:00:10.039
Zero,

00:00:10.039 --> 00:00:13.682
a number that indicates an absence of units.

00:00:13.682 --> 00:00:17.083
In order to understand the genesis of the word zero,

00:00:17.083 --> 00:00:20.913
we must begin with the very origins of counting.

00:00:20.913 --> 00:00:24.308
The earliest known archaeological evidence of counting

00:00:24.308 --> 00:00:28.119
dates back approximately 37,000 years

00:00:28.119 --> 00:00:31.648
and is merely a series of notches in bone.

00:00:31.648 --> 00:00:35.389
It wasn't until around 2500 B.C.

00:00:35.389 --> 00:00:37.236
that the first written number system

00:00:37.236 --> 00:00:40.761
began to take form in Mesopotamia,

00:00:40.761 --> 00:00:45.447
using the units one, ten, and sixty.

00:00:45.447 --> 00:00:47.180
Fast forward another three millennia

00:00:47.180 --> 00:00:49.277
to seventh century India

00:00:49.277 --> 00:00:52.002
where mathematicians used a single dot

00:00:52.002 --> 00:00:53.701
to distinguish between numbers

00:00:53.701 --> 00:00:59.625
like 25, 205, and 250.

00:00:59.625 --> 00:01:02.751
Employed as both a placeholder and a number,

00:01:02.751 --> 00:01:05.132
this all-powerful dot eventually morphed

00:01:05.132 --> 00:01:07.673
into the symbol we know today.

00:01:07.673 --> 00:01:11.503
The word zero comes from the Arabic safira,

00:01:11.503 --> 00:01:15.140
whose literal translation is empty.

00:01:15.140 --> 00:01:17.727
Passing through Italian as zefiro,

00:01:17.727 --> 00:01:22.258
zero came into English in the seventeenth century.

00:01:22.258 --> 00:01:24.779
A second descendant of the Arabic root

00:01:24.779 --> 00:01:27.615
was adopted into English through old French

00:01:27.615 --> 00:01:30.100
as the word cipher.

00:01:30.100 --> 00:01:33.506
Originally sharing the meaning empty with zero,

00:01:33.506 --> 00:01:36.721
cipher later came to describe a code,

00:01:36.721 --> 00:01:39.985
as early codes often used complicated substitutions

00:01:39.985 --> 00:01:42.720
between letters and numbers.

00:01:42.720 --> 00:01:44.878
From this shared empty origin,

00:01:44.878 --> 00:01:48.090
zero continues to represent the number

00:01:48.090 --> 00:01:50.254
that represents nothing.