This article showed us none of that. Not even a single image of a zero.
I'll think about this more next week.
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".
Ereyesterday and overmorrow are perfect equivalents found in some dictionaries, but they're not exactly common.
Vorvorgestern... would be the day before the day before yesterday.
Überübermorgen... the day after the day after tomorrow.
Instead you'd simply say the German equivalent of '3 days ago', or 'in 3 days'.
The simple vorgestern and übermorgen are absolutely in common use though.
One thing I found mildly interesting about the distinction between English and Spanish is that English has "tonight" but no single word for "last night", whereas in Spanish it's the opposite.
There's no specific single word that cannot be modified which means exactly "2 days", like "uebermorgen" which specifically means "the day after tomorrow". You cannot have "5 uebermorgen", for contrast.
You can think more about that the week after.
And yet, we still struggle through life.
In particular, the example which led me to learn about this system was someone traversing something like "neighbour's cousin's friend's neighbour's adopted corella" and addressing him (once translated into english) as "uncle".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero:_The_Biography_of_a_Dange...
