Roman numerals are now dead, nobody would be taken seriously if he extended the roman numeral system in order to prove that the roman numerals could have a zero

Roman numerals are now dead, nobody would be taken seriously if he extended the roman numeral system in order to prove that the roman numerals could have a zero (or negatives). Right? But when cultural systems were alive, they routinely changed, adapted, imported concepts. Sometimes they were replaced, but not simply because they lacked something that could be added One could simply add "N" as nulla and invent something for negative numbers or spell it as a full word. The key point in the arabic/hindi zero is not the 'zero' value of the symbol, but the positional feature of the numbering system. The zero just turns out to be useful to express a lot of numbers in a positional system. Zero by himself is probably less useful and as a concept can be expressed as a full word "nulla" if needed. Indeed I just found out that medieval extension of the roman numeral system included 'nulla': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero If only Romans had to calculate complicated feast dates like Easter, perhaps they'd found the need to include a zero as the medieval computists did. (honestly I have no idea of either the Ancient Rome festivities nor exactly what they used the numbers for, just guessing)