Say it aloud please.....
Most people say the address 1309 as “thirteen, O, nine” not “thirteen, zero, nine.”
You might not have even realized that you hear someone say “O” and you think and write down “zero.” Why do we do that? It points to the phonological loop you have in your brain and economy of effort. The phonological loop is part of your working memory where you are repeating the information you want to remember in your conscious mind over and over. The economy of effort is very simple for a knowledgeable individual. Saying the two syllables for “zero” takes one moment longer and more complex mouth movements than saying O.
With the letter O you just open your mouth once and say the long vowel sound. Think about “economy of effort” and individuals who have long first names such as Timothy or Elizabeth. People in a work setting, where time is valuable, will truncate the name to “Tim” or “Beth.” That is what I believe has happened to the more complex word “zero”. It has been reduced to its last sound- “o.” This is faster and easier to say. It is just confusing for language delayed children and English as a second language learners. What do you think? Dana Merritt MS CCC Speech Language Pathologist and Vision Therapist
This is an interesting question and has resonance with the name of the year around the turn of a century. With the film "2001: A Space Odyssey", and with other SciFi media e.g. "2000A.D.", we were looking to a future where 2000, 2001, ... were pronounced as a number rather than a textual value (two-thousand [and one], rather than twenty hundred or twenty-o-one.) I'm guessing the old-fashioned 1900 was always pronounced "nineteen hundred"?
The interesting thing is that I quite often hear the phrase 'the banking crisis of 2008' is pronounced two-thousand and eight, an extra syllable over twenty-o-eight. At what point do we go back to pronouncing year names as two two-digit numbers e.g. "twenty twenty-five"? Does the phonological loop ignore years?
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