this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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The 12 hour division of the day is about a thousand years older than the idea to write zero as its own number, which I think could be the reason
this, but also, while the number 0 to denote absence of something has been the norm for some time, counting from zero wasn't much of a thing before the digital era
edit: more to support my theory, before the 1950s (the advent of computing) zero wasn't really used as an ordinal at all
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=zeroth%2C0th&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=true
Measuring tools started from 0 way before the digital era. A clock is a measuring tool. The reason is, people were too used to saying "12 o'clock" and seeing a 0 would throw them off
that's true, but when you're measuring something the value you get is a cardinal, not an ordinal. I agree that we have been using 0 as a cardinal for a long time. however, we've been using 0 as an ordinal only since 1950s
people think of time as a sequence of events, hence there's 1st (1 o'clock), 2nd (2 o'clock) and so on until the 12th (12 o'clock)