Let us start with the word for zero. Latin did not have a word
for zero as a numeral the way we do today. Therefore, they did not have a name
for that number either. The Romans did have a word nihil, which meant ‘nothing’. It came from the word-parts
(morphemes) ne‑ ‘not’ and hilum ‘a small thing, a trifle’ and thus
it meant literally something like ‘not a thing’ or ‘nothing’. English borrowed
this word as nil in the 19th century.
Eng. nil is used as a noun, meaning
‘nothing, no amount, zero’ (OED) or, less frequently, as an adjective, meaning
‘containing, reporting, or consisting of nothing; non-existent’ (OED), as in nil results. As a noun, it is used in
Britain (but not in the US) to report non-scoring in sports games.
The Latin word nihil
has no descendants in Spanish, whether patrimonial or learned. The English noun
nil typically translates as cero or nada, e.g. Its value is nil
‘Su valor es cero’, ‘No vale nada’. Adjectival Eng. nil typically translates into Spanish as nulo/a, as in resultados
nulos ‘nil results’. Sp. nulo is
a 16th century loanword from Lat. nūllus
‘none’, a compound formed from ne‑ ‘not’
plus ūllus ‘any’.
English and Spanish share the derived, New Latin cognate words
Eng. nihilism /ˈnaɪ̯.(h)ɪ.lɪ.zəm/ ~ Sp. nihilismo /ni.i.ˈlis.mo/, which refer to a philosophical doctrine that
claims that there is no inherent purpose to life (existential nihilism) or no inherent
morality (moral nihilism). The name of this ‘doctrine of negation’ is the New
Latin word Nihilismus, first coined
in German in the early 19th century. Believers in these philosophical doctrines
are known, respectively, as Eng. nihilists
~ Sp. nihilistas. The term has also
been used in psychology to name certain mental disorders, for example, and in
politics to refer to ‘total rejection of established laws and institutions’
(RHW).
The words for ‘zero’ in English and Spanish are the cognates
Eng. zero (/ˈzɪɹ.oʊ̯/ or /ˈzi.ɹoʊ̯/) and Sp. cero (/ˈθe.ɾo//),
which are obviously not related to Latin nihil.
That is because these words are both derived from or are loanwords from Medieval
Latin zephirum, which comes from Arabic
صِفْر (ṣifr), meaning ‘nothing, cipher’,
which seems to be a translation of Sanskrit śūnya-m
‘empty place, desert, naught’. The word was first used in Europe in Medieval
Latin, by Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, in 1202.
English got this word around 1600 from Italian zero, from an earlier *zefiro, perhaps through the mediation of French zéro (attested
around 1515). However, the word cipher
(see below) is already attested with the meaning ‘zero’ by 1400 in English.
Ultimately the source is the Arabic word transliterated as ṣifr or çifr. The first
documentation of the word cero in Spanish is also from around 1600. Later on,
Spanish respelled all the ze
combinations to ce, of equal
pronunciation. This explains the appearance of the letter c instead of z in this
word (another example: cebra, from an
earlier zebra).
The reason that these words come ultimately from Arabic is that
it was the Arabs who brought the concept of a zero ‘number’ to Europe during the
Middle Ages and replaced the cumbersome Roman numerals (I = 1, V = 5, etc., cf.
§19.21)
with so-called Arabic numerals (Sp. números
arábigos), which depend crucially on the number zero. Arabic numerals are also
known as Hindu numerals or Hindu-Arabic numerals (Sp. números indoarábigos), since the Arabs got the system from India, albeit
indirectly through Persia. The Arabic word was a translation or calque of the
Sanskrit word śūnya, which literally meant
‘empty’ (OED).[1]
The Medieval Latin word zephirum
that zero and cero came from originally meant ‘zero, nothing’, like these words
do now. Eng. cipher and Sp. cifra were originally used with this meaning
before adopting the Italian zero. Eventually,
these other derived words started being used for extended meanings in different
contexts and in different languages. So, for instance, they came to mean ‘numeral’,
that is, any number, in Spanish and French. Thus, Modern Spanish cifra, ultimately derived from Med.Lat. zephirum, just like Sp. cero but without the Italian mediation, means
‘figure, number, digit, amount’, as in un
número de tres cifras ‘a three digit number’ or La cifra es muy elevada ‘the figure (amount) is very high’ (cf. the
French cognate chiffre /ˈʃifʀ/, with the same meaning).
Later in the 16th century, this same word came to mean ‘coded
message’ in French and Italian, from where it passed to English as cipher or cypher /ˈsaɪ̯.fəɹ/. The reason for this change is that early codes typically
substituted letters with numbers. The Spanish word cifra has been used in the past to mean ‘cipher’, through French and
English influence, but the best equivalents for cipher in Spanish are código
and clave, not cifra. So, as we can see, Eng. cipher
and Sp. cifra are cognates, but they
are not very good friends.
The English numeral zero
has been converted into a verb in English, in particular as the phrasal verb zero in (on) (for more on phrasal verbs,
see Part I, Chapter 4,
§4.8.3).
The verb to zero first appeared in
1909 with the meaning of turning the setting in a rifle scope to zero. The
phrasal verb to zero in is from
around 1944 and it means ‘set the sights of (a gun) for firing’ or ‘take aim at or focus attention on’ (COED).
This phrasal verb can be translated into Spanish as apuntarle directamente a, when talking about a target, or centrarse en, concentrar la atención en or
sobre, when talking about an issue or problem (OES).
[1] The
Arabic number system is one of the most important developments in the history
of mathematics, primarily because it included the zero in positional notation.
Most historians believe that it originated in India by AD 700, although the
positional system may have had a precedent in China.
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