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by adrian_b
605 days ago
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What you say about children is true and I have already said in my first comment that the structure of the words meaning "zero" in most old recorded languages indicates that the concept of "zero" must be more recent than the concepts of the other small numbers and of negation. Nevertheless, even if the concept of zero has been understood later than the concepts of 1, 2, 3 ..., it has still been understood in many places at least four thousand to five thousand years ago, i.e. already by the time of the oldest writings that have been preserved and thousands of years before the invention of the positional system of writing numbers, where the importance of zero has greatly increased and where it has required a dedicated graphic symbol. |
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