La maison de la Sagesse, les dictionnaires et le zéro

The invention of zero is a Mediterranean adventure. Imagine a Greek sea, then Roman, then Arabic, each as a place of trade and scientific exchanges, prioritized by caliphs eager to enhance knowledge, via a language ultimately accepted as the international scientific language, and by means, too, of the the focused process of translation. The “zero adventure” shows that translation does not necessarily require dictionaries. That is, there are some untranslatable ­concepts which, as a function of their source and destination, do not share a ­common basis or understanding.