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And yet, 0 does represent, basically, nothing! That's the Hindu concept of destruction of maya and a return to Ishwara.

Ok, let me try and explain what Hindu thought is -- badly, as I can't remember all the terminologies used.

Do note one thing -- Hinduism is not some primitive belief with no philosophy or just worshipping stones. They have a rich mythology and they have literally multiple philosophies -- some like the Tantrics believe in 'black magic', while some like the Arya Samaj reject all depictions of god and only worship "Ishwara" -- their temples are basically meeting halls. Some Hindus worship certain gods for their aspects, some hindus like Vaishnavites worship only Vishnu or his avatars, others, the Shaivites worship only Shiva, the god of destruction. Some Hindus believe there is only one god, Ishwara or Vishnu or Shiva etc., others believe in a pantheon, others are practically atheistic, others are animists. In short, this is a deep and varied META-religion or umbrella term for multiple religions and my explanation will NOT do justice to it.

In some Hindu thoughts -- especially the Brahminical Vaishnavite, the entire universe is believed to have been created by a High God, Ishwara, who created Brahma and Vishnu, while Shiva was an emanation of Ishwara.

Brahma woke up and created the universe (and then basically he leaves it -- so the idea of the impersonal creator deity).

The universe goes through 4 yugas (or ages). In the first yuga, Satya (or truth) all beings are good. in the second most are good. in the third, the bad predominate. in the fourth (Kali-yuga -- I don't know what Kali means) most are evil.

Each yuga lasts millions of years (the Hindu counting of ages is literally mind-boggling. Satya yuga is 1,728,000 years and the others I can't remember (1728 is close to the square of 42 which is interesting to a Douglas Adam's fan)

Now note this -- at the end of Kali yuga, the universe is completely destroyed and re-absorbed into Brahma. BUT THEN HE goes to sleep and when he wakes up the next Brahma-day, He RE-CREATES the universe and the cycle starts again.

Brahma lives for 100 of his years, re-creating and absorbing the universe over and over again and at the end of this time, he himself is absorbed into Ishwara and the multiverse comes to an end.

Now, I've never been able to understand one thing, why Hindus don't worship Brahma except to invoke him at the start of a yagna.

Vishnu gets more "respect", but then only as one of his 10 avatars -- Ram and Krishna being the most famous, but also others like Narasimha. This story (of Narasimha) is interesting. It seems there was once a rakshasa (Asura or demon or evil figure) who meditated for centuries to Brahma. And Brahma was pleased and came to meet the Rakshasa and said "what boon can I give you" (on an aside, Brahma always seems to be giving stupid boons like this, giving powers to demons!).

And the demon says "ok, make me immortal". Brahma may be stupid, but he ain't dumb, so he says "nope". But then the demon says "ok, then let me live forever and let no one be able to kill me neither man nor beast, no one can kill me at day or night or inside or outside and let no weapon be able to kill me." and Brahma being the idiot grants this and leaves the mess for others to clear up.

So, the rakshasa goes about doing his bad things, invades the world of the gods, terrorises them and so the gods pray to Vishnu who incarnates as Narasimha, half-man, half-lion. This Narasimha then takes the demon at twilight (not day nor night) and puts him across his knees over the threshold (neither inside nor outside) and then carves him open with his claws (no weapon)!

Anyway, I digress -- 0 does mean nothing. it is not a place marker. The place marker is the decimal point (another invention by Indians)

I got this from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

The word "zero" came via French zéro from Venetian zero, which (together with cipher) came via Italian zefiro from Arabic صفر, ṣafira = "it was empty", ṣifr = "zero", "nothing"

I didn't know this route! The Indic word for this is shunya meaning nothingNESS.

In fact, here are the numeric systems that I know of (if you know Greek or Arabic, you can fill in the gaps!). Pardon the spellings as I can't remember my german spellings very well and the hindi ones are transliterated from Devanagari to Latin script

Hindi	Polish	French	German	English
Ek	Jeden	Un	Eins	One
Don	Dwa	Deux	Zwei	Two
Teen	Trzy	Trios	Drei	Three
Char	Cztery	Quatre	Vier	Four
Panch	Pięć	Cinq	Funf	Five
Che	Sześć	Six	Secz	Six
Saat	Siedem	Sept	Sieben	Seven
Aat	Osiem	Huit	Acht	Eight
Nau	Dziewięć	Neuf	Neun	Nine
Dus	Dziesięć	dix	zehng	Ten

Now Hindi is of course from the Indic family tree with some mixture of Iranic (Farsi), Polish is a slavic tongue (and closer to Indo-Irani than to Germanic/Celtic/Latin), French is a Romance tongue, GErman and ENglish are both Germanic languages.

Ok, English is actually the b****** child of Germanic and French and that's apparent even in the number systems -- Un, One and Zehn, Ten.

On a side-note, the English language's mixture of Anglo-SAxon and French is apparent in food too -- the rich ate beef, i.e. boeuf (French for cow) and the poor ate cow! Ditto for Mutton (Mouton) and the poor ate sheep