Gregor_Reisch,_Margarita_Philosophica,_1508
“The Sanskrit name for zero is sunya; the Arabic name is as-sifr. Both words have the same signification: ‘the empty’. The Arabic word sifr was transcribed into medieval Latin as cifra or zefirum. However, these two Latin words acquired quite different meanings. The word zefirum (or cefirum, as Leonardo of Pisa wrote it in the thirteenth century) retained its original meaning ‘zero’. In Italian it was changed to zefiro, zefro or zevero, which was shortened in the Venetian dialect to zero. On the other hand the word cifra acquired a more general meaning: it was used to denote any of the ten signs 0,1,2,…,9. Hence the French word chiffre, and the English word cipher. The old English expression ‘he is a mere cipher’ meaning ‘he counts for nothing’, still shows that the original meaning of cipher was ‘zero’.”
Flegg goes on to show that this ambiguity existed in French as well. Although the word cipher was eventually used for the Hindu-Arabic numerals themselves, Flegg explains that 15th century people found it puzzling that zero was “nothing,” on the one hand, but on the other hand, by placing it after another digit the value of the numeral was multiplied by ten.
Apparently even in the early 15th century, Germans continued to use the Roman numerals. It was only in the merchant and banking cultures of Italy that the Hindu-Arabic numerals, together with the place-value system and 10 distinct numerals, finally took hold.
Numbers Through the Ages, edited by Graham Flegg. Macmillan: The Open University, 1989, pp. 126-129.
