[Cronos]

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

[Cronos]

ok, that's jumping from numerics to linguistics. Yet, I see this all being connected: numerics, linguistics, ethnic, cultures, religion, environment. Because the Hindus had a religion that dealt with trying to figure out how things got created and how the created got created, they had to have numbers, high numbers, numbers that described shunya (nothing). Because their maths was so advanced, they had to have a language that was mathematically precise, so they refined Sanskrit from prakrit. Because their language was so mathematically precise, their religion had to have numeric details, and so on and so forth in a big circle.

The Hindu meta-religion arises from the richness of the Indian gangetic valley -- lots of vegetarian food, so increasing the push towards vegetarianism, then merging this with all of the various local gods etc.