"Nik": The Mesoamerican Representation of Zero (2021)

[dtagames]

I always find these articles about highly visual subjects that don't show any images to be a little bit under-researched. The Maya language and numeral system is fascinating in part because of its visual beauty. Maya text and design elements are widely incorporated into architecture and media in the region, even today.

This article showed us none of that. Not even a single image of a zero.

[hobs]

Check out Figure 1 again, it definitely has one.

[paleotrope]

"It is noteworthy to point out that in Spanish or English, there are no expressions of time that go any further than two days into the past or the future;"

I'll think about this more next week.

[thaumasiotes]

I figured they were going for a distinction between words and phrases, where it's true that "yesterday" is an opaque lexical item while "next week" is a compositional phrase.

But they seem to just be buffoons:

> Mayan languages express future and past days with great ease and expanse, both into the past and towards the future. To name past and future days in my Kaqchik’el Mayan language, for example, we construct the word starting with the number of days we want to express plus a suffix implying past or future.

This sounds about as exotic as an English construction of the form "three days ago".

[jeroenhd]

The distinction between the use of "ago" and compositional words that this text makes doesn't make much sense to me, but I do find the lack of a common word for "the day before yesterday" and "the day after tomorrow" quite jarring when my native language has a common word for it.

Ereyesterday and overmorrow are perfect equivalents found in some dictionaries, but they're not exactly common.

[bryanrasmussen]

I believe expressions in this case means words that refer to the concept, they are however wrong because I will be thinking about it in a fortnight.

[baxtr]

You’ll forgot about it in 2 days.

[linearrust]

Probably a legacy of primitive humans only being able to count to 2. Such limitations are reflected in our language. Hence why we have 'half' rather than 'twoth'.

You can think more about that the week after.

[anthk]

As a Spaniard we used to have a word for '3 days ago':

[zdragnar]

English also doesn't have dedicated words for various familiar relationships, unlike some other languages. Older / younger brother, father's eldest brother, neighbors cousins friends neighbors dog, that sort of thing.

And yet, we still struggle through life.

[sbarre]

Maybe only slightly on topic, years ago I highly enjoyed this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero:_The_Biography_of_a_Dange...