Hi, Arkady! A friend (@rnanqo) and I were wondering—can Teixcalaanli names use zero? Do parents who hate their kids name them zero?
... what an interesting question.
I opened this ask thinking oh this'll take two minutes and be entertaining to answer and I got five words in and realized the answer has radical and foundational influence on Teixcalaanli mathematics and philosophy.
The answer, by the way, is no. Teixcalaanli names do not use zero. (There are exceptions. The exceptions are self-chosen monikers. You might imagine the members of a nihilist literary movement, and/or that guy in your dormitory who has decided to start a screamo band, and you'll get the idea.)
The lack of zero in the number-signifier slots in Teixcalaanli names, however, says that at the time when the number/noun personal identity-marker was developed in Teixcalaanli culture (recall that name systems shift faster than one often imagines; the universality of surnames in English, for example, is in a large part a consequence of the state apparatus of late medieval England becoming more demanding of individual legibility, i.e. the state would like to know which Thomas to tax, and thus you end up with Thomas Smith and Thomas Baker), Teixcalaanli language was differentiating between numbers used for symbolic purposes (felicitous and infelicitous values) and numbers used for calculation (which require a zero to do nearly any complex mathematics).
The two were probably collapsed at one point, very early.
I direct you to the Mayan Long Count, for ideas.
Also to the excellent book Seeing Like A State, by James C. Scott.
