Fun fact - in Polish we have separate forms for 1 (singular), 2-4 (plural but nit many) and everything else. Zero is in “everything else”
0 książek
0.5 książki
1 książka
2,3,4 książki
2.5 książki
5 and above książek
5.5 (any other fraction) książki
>100 and a fraction - depends
Singular is for one.
The first plural is for things kind of treated as individual objects.
The second plural is for things that are treated as a bulk/mass.
The moment you use a fraction, the assumption is that you would need to count all I guess, so it’s treated as individual objects.
From this perspective, zero of something is zero plural-not-easily countable. Kind of “Zero OF books” like “Ten OF books”, with of being implied by the form of the word.
The term in linguistics for a category of 3 or 4 things is "paucal". Most languages with a paucal separate 2 from 3 or 4, resulting in four noun categories/forms by number: singular (1), dual (2), paucal (3 - 4? a few?) and plural (5+). That's quite a common pattern among the world's languages. Polish and the other Slavic languages with this feature are a little unusual in not having the separate dual. A few languages have a trial (3) as a distinct category but it's rare. And some languages distinguish between a greater and lesser paucal, roughly "a few" vs "many", usually with the singular, dual and plural as well, having 5 categories of noun number.
Languages with these features often have lots of irregularities around them, too. In the same way that "pants" are plural for no reason in English, eyes might be plural instead of the obvious-seeming dual, etc. And if that seems all a bit unnecessarily numerical, you may be right; Chinese has gotten by for thousands of years without any plurals at all.
Not certain about Polish any more (it’s 15 years or so since I studied) but certainly Russian uses the genitive singular after numbers ending in 2, 3, and 4 (e.g. 02, 23, 34, but not the “teens”) and genitive plural for numbers ending in 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0). The endings here look the same.
Does Polish also use the same form for 20 as for 0 (i.e. 20 książek)? As I remember it does. If I remember correctly, Polish also differs from Russian in that it only uses the singular for 1, not for all numbers ending in 1 (except 11).
(Note for linguists, it’s not actually quite the genitive, but it’s close enough not to warrant its own case)
It's the same or similar in many if not all Slavic languages. Just goes to show true internationalization in software is almost impossible because you don't know all the rules in all the languages of the world. E.g. if you treat numbers as singular like English does you will have difficulty with Polish because you were unaware it has a special case for 2-4. And then you can have a third language that handles 2-7 differently.
> The moment you use a fraction, the assumption is that you would need to count all I guess, so it’s treated as individual objects.
I always explained it to myself that, when you use a fraction, you're focusing on that one incomplete object, also calling more attention to the individuality of objects in the set. So in case of say, "100.5 książki", I like to imagine shoving ~95 books into the box very quickly, then slowing down for the last 6 books, counting them off one by one, to know exactly when to stop and saw the 106th book in half.
Because speakers of English arrived at the arbitrary decision that it is.
Whenever you're faced with the question: "why is x y?", you should ask yourself "is x y?". In this case, zero is plural... in English. But not in all languages! (I think in Arabic zero is singular.)
You can read about plural rules in different languages here[1]. For example some languages have three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. This is what Proto Indo European had and some descendants still do. Have you ever found it weird how "pants" or "glasses" are kinda plural but also kinda singular?
An interesting table to look at is here[2]. It compares all the rules in various languages for how to form cardinals. For example, English has two numbers: singular and plural and two rules to determine it: `n == 1`, `n != 1`.
My language, Romanian, also has only singular and plural, but we have three different categories: singular, plural without "of", plural with "of": `n == 1`, `n != 1 && n % 100 == 1..19`, `...the remaining cases...`. So we say "3319 horses", but "3320 of horses". It's very weird, but that's how languages work.
I was thinking of this too, oddly, also examples around books.
I vaguely feel like “no book” could also be parsed as… not one book, maybe? Like we’re saying there isn’t even one book on the subject. Maybe?
I dunno. The scenario that popped into my head was: what if you had a bookshop, where the shopkeeper would sometimes pick out books for you. If they said “I have no books for you today,” I’d imagine that they just generally didn’t find any books for you. Meanwhile if they said “I have no book for you today,” I guess I’d expect that you are waiting for a particular book, and it didn’t come in today. Somehow, there is a difference between the absence of a book and the absence of any books, even though in fact there are zero books in either case.
Yes, I think (2) is sort of like saying "not even 1" and more likely a response to someone saying there is a book, whereas (1) is a more common phrasing and is just saying how many books there are.
Something can be “a book” on the subject, or “the book” on the subject in the sense of the one commonly accepted authoritative reference. I read the above as referring to those two senses respectively.
"0" is the same thing as "no" and thus it is a negation of something.
Why would you remove the plural from something if your intention is to negate it?
If someone drinks your beers, then you have no beers because it's a negation of multiple beers.
If you don't know how many beers there were then it's likely there was more than one anyway.
ps: we can also say the beers were mutiplied by 0.
Liquids are an example of non-countable nouns - "I have no water" but "I have zero oranges."
Some thoughts:
- English requires the use of an article with singular nouns, because the question of "which X" is important.
- This question is impossible for plural nouns (no "which X" when X is 2 or more), and where the noun doesn't actually exist - because it's meant as a type or because it physically doesn't exist.
- So these situations require no article to be used.
- English is so flexible that a phrase like "two oranges" can be "singularized" and therefore a sentence like this is possible: "Take the two oranges and put them here." What's implied and meant here is "1 group of two oranges" so it's still consistent.
- That's all brought up because it's another place in the language where zero and plural obey the same logic.
I suspect it is the difference between saying “1 book” and “none of the books”. The former is singling out a single book, but saying zero books is highlighting the negative of all books. Ergo, “0 books” is plural, because it is excluding all the books instead of including a specific subset.
IIRC, formally "personne" has to be used with the "ne" negation in order to mean 'nobody', such as "personne ne l'a vu", which makes a certain kind of sense ('a person hasn't seen it' -> nobody has seen it). But French people usually drop "ne" in spoken language.
I think it extends from whatever rules govern the much-more-influential word "No", particularly for items which aren't normally capped at 1.
Notice how these are all plural, and in each case "no" could be substituted with "zero":
* "My shelf contains no books."
* "Snails have no legs."
* "What if there were no stars in the sky?"
You can't simply replace those examples with a singular noun: You're either forced to refactor the grammar or you end up with something that sounds weird/archaic. Ex:
You are using examples which are typically plural. Consider instead these singular forms:
"My shelf contains no Elf-on-a-Shelf" / "My shelf contains no elephant" / "My shelf contains no Hemingway book." / "My shelf contains no book by Hemingway."
(For an example of the third: "Don't look there for a copy of 'The Old Man and the Sea'? I detest Hemingway, and my shelf contains no Hemingway book." In this case, 'no' means something like 'not even one'.)
As for the others, "legs" rarely come in a singular form. There is (usually) only one king for an entire population, and there is (usually) only one soul per creature, so these singular forms are just fine:
"Snails have no king." / "Snails have no soul."
There's usually a lot of stars, but our solar system has but one sun, making the following singular form just fine:
I'd say steering wheels are "normally capped at 1"... although I recall one distinct occasion where I expected two steering wheels, in a training car for new drivers. Alas, it seemed the local school-district could only afford a car with a second brake-pedal for the instructor, which did very little to help my anxieties.
So my first time behind the (singular) wheel and they told me to pull onto a major street next to the school, without even doing circles in a parking lot or anything. I guess they just expected most students had already done some illicit/private driving? Anywho, it was more stressful than any rollercoaster and I had shaky legs when my turn was finally over.
(Then I put an onion on my belt, as was the style of the time...)
Exactly right. Op uses “snails have no legs” because most things have 2+ legs or none. But snails do have one foot. If there was a snail without a foot, you’d say “this one has no foot”
> You can't naively rewrite those examples with a singular
"What if there was no star in the sky?" does not sound particularly weird, and we can find instances of people using that exact phrase. If we focus on the key aspect of that statement, "no star in the sky" appears to be commonly used.
It is possible I’ve made a completely imaginary link, but “no star in the sky” sounds slightly odd but in a poetic way. In particular “no star” seems pretty close to “not a star.” I mean, zero stars is technically zero stars.
But if someone says “There was no star in the sky,” I parse that as something like: An astonishingly dark night, I searched the sky quite carefully and found not even one star.
Meanwhile I parse “no stars in the sky” as: a very dark night, I didn’t see any stars.
Of course really, it is always a matter of degree technically, right? The stars are always there. They are just sometimes attenuated to the point where your eye doesn’t detect them.
> "What if there was no star in the sky?" does not sound particularly weird
I disagree: The most-charitable scenario I can think of is that someone has context-shifted from regular "stars" to "our sun, Sol, which is technically a star even though we typically consider it separate from the rest."
In other words, it involves a situation where someone is assuming the amount is capped at 1. (Yes, I know binary stars exist.)
Compare:
* "What if there was no star for Earth to orbit?" [Works because =1 is the normal assumption in this context]
* "What if there was no star in the night sky?" [This is weird.]
* "What if there was no constellation?" [This is also weird.]
[A lesser light asks Ummon⫽
What are the activities of a sramana>⫽
Ummon answers⫽
I have not the slightest idea⑊⫽
The dim light then says⫽
Why haven’t you any idea>⫽
Ummon replies⫽
I just want to keep my no-idea]
⠀
More interesting is to compare languages. Other than native English, I only know Hindi (plural zero) and French (singular zero).
I wonder what and why the divide is, perhaps especially when among these three at least I believe zero has a common conceptual origin in al-Khvārizmī (post Roman).
In Hebrew there's a dual beside singular and plural. It's used for things / body parts that come in twos, like legs, pants, scissors etc. Typically, these same nouns don't have a proper plural form, or the plural form is very rarely used / means something else.
It's a little weird to use Hebrew word for zero to say that one doesn't have something: it feels like it's been copied from English, but not weird enough for native speakers not to use it. So, when someone says "there are zero pants in the shop", they'd use the dual form.
In other situations, when nouns have typical singular and plural forms, and one uses "zero" to mean that there are none available, then most of the time, they'd use plural, except for cases where singular can stand for plural, which is typical for units, currency, "times". So, while maybe not grammatically correct enough to write in a book, it doesn't sound foreign to say "zero meter" to mean "very close" or "zero shekel" to mean "free of charge".
Russian and relatives act very similar to English in this regard: I cannot think of a case where it would've been OK to use "zero" with singular noun (outside of nouns that don't have plural form). But using "zero" in this context is not a natural way for anyone to describe the absence of thing. It usually sounds as if the speaker wants to prank the listener who probably expected a non-zero value. Similar to how it would sound if in English you'd use negative numbers for the same purpose: "I have negative one apple" is, I suppose, grammatically correct, but isn't a phrase you'd expect if asking anyone about the number of apples they have.
On the more general point, as I understand it comes down to what the speakers expect for the quantity. If it is generally expected to be plural, zero will probably be plural as well, if singular is more usual zero will follow.
I actually didn't know this so it's new to me but maybe I'm missing the nuances of English..
There is only 1 quantity in 0.. Or inversely there is a singular ABSENSE of a quantity. So how it's explained in the answer doesn't really explain it for me.
Edit: I also have a problem understanding "On accident" when for me it's surely "By accident". English is strange.
Incidentally i see 'on accident' more from Americans. In British English we tend to use 'by', so 'on' sounds a little strange but I've grown to like it recently.
The answer is that’s just the way English is. Exactly 1 is singular, everything else is plural (mostly).
“On accident” is American English, as a British English speaker I’d consider it a grammatical mistake. The same goes with “I forgot it at home” and similar constructs. However they’re correct American English.
Firstly, that is your interpretation of zero. It is also an abscence of all the possible values that it could be, which is a plural concept.
Secondly, yeah American English is moronic and full of barstadised phrases. In the UK, we always say "by accident". We also say "I couldn't care less" not "I could care less", the American version which is illogical. If the meaning is to be "I care the minimum amount possible", then only "I couldn't care less" makes sense. The American version implies that you actually care a significant amount.
It seems that from the large variation in the way different languages treat zero, there's no significant rationale behind whether it's plural or not, apart from following some existing (and ultimately also ad-hoc) pattern.
It's just the way that people (via social mechanisms - mostly mimicry) standardized expressing the absence of something.
Both in speaking language, and in quite some programming languages "1" is assumed to be an integer, and "1.0" is assumed to be a number with one decimal (something akin to a float). And I'd say integer "1" is the most precise type of one.
If we are rounding numbers you are right though...
round_to_int(0.5000000 to 1.499999) -> 1
round_to_one_decimal(0.9500000 to 1.049999) -> 1.0
I might just take it that the special case is more for the word 'one', not the value of one.
Or perhaps more for one of a discreet object, where the litre is considered as a single thing but 1.0 is implying a continuous measurement so it changes how we think of it?
I am not sure that it's a function of English language per se. I speak several language and it's the same story with all of them and one of those languages is Slavic so it comes from a very different root. That said, Greece is a rock throw away and I think the ancient Greek mathematicians(Pythagoras primarily) might have something to do with it: The Egyptians were the first known to use symbols to represents parts of something but it wasn't until the Greeks introduced fractions to express a quantifiable representation of sub-divisions of a unit, making the sub-division it's own unit: you need 4 * 1/4-th's of something to make it to 1 complete unit.
In Italy we would translate "two 2s, zero 3s, and one 5" as "due 2, zero 3 e un 5". No plurals for the numbers. By the way "un" is the "a" article and not the "uno" number. Using the number would sound more than strange.
Languages are just what they settled down to be, until they change little by little every day.
The Académie française does not edict official rules. Nobody does, there is no official governing authority for the French language but the ministry of Education is the main reference in France. Their rules are generally used for official documents, and since they decide what gets taught to children that's what becomes the normal language when the children become adults.
Also, it costs about 1 million euros per year[0], I wouldn't call that very expensive on the scale of a country like France. Even if it's absolutely useless.
In practice, zero is normally singular in French unless you want to show that there is none of a number of things ("zéro produits artificiels", "zéro émissions").
This matches my intuition. Zero is synonymous with "the absence of any X".
The singular equivalent would be perhaps "non-" or "-less".
Hot take: zero is a math concept and math deals with multitudes only (even under one, you're dealing with a multitude of parts). The actual irregularity is the usage of singular noun form in a math context.
So here's a modern Greek perspective to add to the choir. In modern Greek zero is indeed plural, you would say 0 βαθμοί for example to say 0 degrees. However, in contrast to English:
1.5 books
ενάμιση βιβλίο -- singular!
You are functionally saying something closer to "a book and a half" in english I guess! Actually this is an interesting duality in english: 1.5 books but a book and a half. Guess it depends on how "separate" linguistically the numbers are: is it one book and a half book or is it a single quantity? Greek for decimals between 1 and 2 picks the "two quantities" approach.
Math is very precise, and has very obvious correct and incorrect answers. Language much less so. So when we have a question like this, it FEELS like there should be an obvious and precise answer because we are talking about math, BUT we are using language to talk about math, so we are going back to an imprecise realm; which may feel confusing and wrong.
This is also the effect behind the engagement bait word problems and order of operations problems you see on social media.
None of the answers give a really satisfactory answer for the underlying reason.
I have a theory, although I don't have any evidence. Zero is arelatively recent concept, and probably became part of the language after the rules for pluralization were well established. So when zero came into use it was used similar to negating a plural, like "no widgets" or "not any widgets", so the plural was used. Or maybe it felt unnatural to use singular with a number other than one.
Wikipedia tells me that the first known usage of "zero" in English was 1598, certainly well after the rules for plurals were set.
Wikipedia also tells me that people started speaking what we now call Old English around 450, and also tells me that there were examples of something close to the idea of "zero" going back as far as 1770BC, although the usual history of "zero" in English just goes back to borrowing it from Sanskrit, where it might have first appeared as early as ~300±80 but definitely appeared in 458.
I'm curious how much of the answer to this is simply because it sounds nicer? That is, the search is largely for technical reasons for something to be so. But, couldn't it just as realistically be that it is an aesthetic path that leads to this?
I see one of the comments says it rolls off the tongue nicely. I feel that that is far far more of the reason than people are opting for in the rest of the discussions.
That it sounds nicer is equivalent to saying that a native speaker uses it this way. There's no why to it; language evolves based on how it is used. The aesthetics are downstream of the fact that this is the way that native speakers use it.
The question is whether there is a rule that we can use to determine the correct way to modify the noun which it modifies. And the answer is ... sort of?
As an argument against the pure aesthetic argument (in the sense that maybe the usage of it is driven by superior aesthetics) we can find some counterexamples. We can say "there are zero marks on this ruler" and we can also say "here is the zero mark on this ruler". Both of these sentences make perfect sense and are immediately parsable by a native speaker. "There is zero mark on this ruler" and "here is the zero marks on this ruler" are clearly both wrong. The difference here is that in one case we are using "zero" to refer to a quantity and in the other to a non-quantity.
Apropos of which I learned today that some languages have not merely a plural, but a whole complex of representations for cardinality, including rather more of the counting values than I expected, and variations for uncertainty and optionality (some might say, superposition).
' “I have no legs” means that I have 0 legs (as opposed to 1 leg or 2 legs), while “I have no leg” means that I have not any leg (i.e., I do not have any leg) '
made me laugh :D
Edit: To be honest, I don't see the difference between "I have 0 legs" and "I do not have any leg", can someone explain?
This is true at least in Brazil though I'm fairly certain it's shared grammar with the descendants of the European barbarians who invaded it in the 1500s.
1) Zero is expressing the absence of any, and its singular "just one" that is a special case
2) Plurality of zero is inconsistent with a lot of more modern creates using singular - zero carb, zero tolerance, etc. In these cases it does look like they simply substituted the word "zero" in for "no".
Incorrectly top voted answers. "zeroes" is the plural form. The use of zero in "zero 3s" is not the number 0 but an adjective, synonym to "no" in that context.
I guess this is one of the reasons for the failing popularity of the Stack Exchange sites, simply voted best answers that are incorrect.
Similar to how you will find 30 incorrect upvoted seemingly correct-but-actually-incorrect answers to many reddit questions with the correct answer hidden deep down in the comments with no karma.
This is incredibly confusing. Of course the plural of zero (as a noun) is zero(e)s. But then you state that you understand that it's not about the noun, and still go on to say that the answers sharing your view are wrong..?
I think you're misunderstanding the question — possibly for comedic effect (?), it's hard to tell.
"zeroes" is the plural form of the noun "zero", yes. But the question is about using the form "zero" as an adjective and how that should affect the plurality of the noun it applies to: "zero book(s)", for example.
The body of the question makes it abundantly clear what the OP is asking, which has nothing to do with the plural form of the noun "zero". You could suggest an improvement to the title, but answering "zeroes" and pretending it's the only correct answer is being deliberately obtuse.
I rather like Greek for having a dual form as well as a singular and plural form. (Translators made me add dual-form messages as well as singular and plural form messages).
> The second example I give of "zero threes" does not imply that three is plural. If anything it merely implies belonging or associativity in a linguistic sense and certainly not a maths sense.
It absolutely does denote plurality. "0 threes" uses "three" in the plural form and "1 three" uses "three" in a singular form.
Thus is not a question about math, but about linguistics.
Fun fact - in Polish we have separate forms for 1 (singular), 2-4 (plural but nit many) and everything else. Zero is in “everything else”
0 książek
0.5 książki
1 książka
2,3,4 książki
2.5 książki
5 and above książek
5.5 (any other fraction) książki
>100 and a fraction - depends
Singular is for one.
The first plural is for things kind of treated as individual objects.
The second plural is for things that are treated as a bulk/mass.
The moment you use a fraction, the assumption is that you would need to count all I guess, so it’s treated as individual objects.
From this perspective, zero of something is zero plural-not-easily countable. Kind of “Zero OF books” like “Ten OF books”, with of being implied by the form of the word.
The term in linguistics for a category of 3 or 4 things is "paucal". Most languages with a paucal separate 2 from 3 or 4, resulting in four noun categories/forms by number: singular (1), dual (2), paucal (3 - 4? a few?) and plural (5+). That's quite a common pattern among the world's languages. Polish and the other Slavic languages with this feature are a little unusual in not having the separate dual. A few languages have a trial (3) as a distinct category but it's rare. And some languages distinguish between a greater and lesser paucal, roughly "a few" vs "many", usually with the singular, dual and plural as well, having 5 categories of noun number.
Languages with these features often have lots of irregularities around them, too. In the same way that "pants" are plural for no reason in English, eyes might be plural instead of the obvious-seeming dual, etc. And if that seems all a bit unnecessarily numerical, you may be right; Chinese has gotten by for thousands of years without any plurals at all.
> Chinese has gotten by for thousands of years without any plurals at all.
Chinese has plurals; 们 has no other use.
I believe Slovenian is the only living official Slavic language that still retains this feature.
EDIT: I know that some dialects of coastal croatian still retain this feature. But there may be more
Not certain about Polish any more (it’s 15 years or so since I studied) but certainly Russian uses the genitive singular after numbers ending in 2, 3, and 4 (e.g. 02, 23, 34, but not the “teens”) and genitive plural for numbers ending in 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0). The endings here look the same.
Does Polish also use the same form for 20 as for 0 (i.e. 20 książek)? As I remember it does. If I remember correctly, Polish also differs from Russian in that it only uses the singular for 1, not for all numbers ending in 1 (except 11).
(Note for linguists, it’s not actually quite the genitive, but it’s close enough not to warrant its own case)
It's the same or similar in many if not all Slavic languages. Just goes to show true internationalization in software is almost impossible because you don't know all the rules in all the languages of the world. E.g. if you treat numbers as singular like English does you will have difficulty with Polish because you were unaware it has a special case for 2-4. And then you can have a third language that handles 2-7 differently.
You just do (p)ngettext. It works if care for it to work and proofread the interface instead of raw files.
> The moment you use a fraction, the assumption is that you would need to count all I guess, so it’s treated as individual objects.
I always explained it to myself that, when you use a fraction, you're focusing on that one incomplete object, also calling more attention to the individuality of objects in the set. So in case of say, "100.5 książki", I like to imagine shoving ~95 books into the box very quickly, then slowing down for the last 6 books, counting them off one by one, to know exactly when to stop and saw the 106th book in half.
IDK what the official justification is.
Interesting.
It's the opposite in Russian — it'd be "100½ książek" there (сто c половиной книжек), even though it's "½ książki" (половина книжки).
"½ książek" (половина книжек) is also valid, and it means "half of (all the) books".
But in "100½", it's the whole number that determines the ending (i.e. case) of the word.
And it gets weirder. If you have 5 or more of something, you use the neuter singular form of verbs for it.
4 books were sitting on the shelf = Stały 5 książek na półce [feminine plural verb, which makes sense]
5 books were sitting on the shelf = Stało 5 książek na półce [neuter singular???]
As someone learning Polish this is quite confusing.
You have an error there (bad copy-paste?).
Should be "Stały 4 książki na półce".
Anyway, to make sense of the second one: treat "5 książek" as "5 of books", or "a 5-set of books"
— Four books were sitting on a shelf ("books" are plural, feminine)
— A five-set of books was sitting on a shelf ("five-set" is singular, neutral)
Now, why 5 becomes a set and 4 doesn't is not something I have a clue about.
But hope it helps grok how it affects the form of the noun being enumerated :)
We also have a separate case for missing something.
So it's "Mam 3 książki" (I have 3 books) but "Nie mam 3 książek" (I don't have 3 books) or "Brakuje 3 książek" (3 books are missing).
Because speakers of English arrived at the arbitrary decision that it is.
Whenever you're faced with the question: "why is x y?", you should ask yourself "is x y?". In this case, zero is plural... in English. But not in all languages! (I think in Arabic zero is singular.)
You can read about plural rules in different languages here[1]. For example some languages have three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. This is what Proto Indo European had and some descendants still do. Have you ever found it weird how "pants" or "glasses" are kinda plural but also kinda singular?
An interesting table to look at is here[2]. It compares all the rules in various languages for how to form cardinals. For example, English has two numbers: singular and plural and two rules to determine it: `n == 1`, `n != 1`.
My language, Romanian, also has only singular and plural, but we have three different categories: singular, plural without "of", plural with "of": `n == 1`, `n != 1 && n % 100 == 1..19`, `...the remaining cases...`. So we say "3319 horses", but "3320 of horses". It's very weird, but that's how languages work.
[1]: https://cldr.unicode.org/index/cldr-spec/plural-rules [2]: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/46/supplemental/language...
The answer says zero is treated as "plural" because we say "0 books".
Interestingly, we can say either:
1. "There are no books on this subject"
2. "There is no book on this subject"
I was thinking of this too, oddly, also examples around books.
I vaguely feel like “no book” could also be parsed as… not one book, maybe? Like we’re saying there isn’t even one book on the subject. Maybe?
I dunno. The scenario that popped into my head was: what if you had a bookshop, where the shopkeeper would sometimes pick out books for you. If they said “I have no books for you today,” I’d imagine that they just generally didn’t find any books for you. Meanwhile if they said “I have no book for you today,” I guess I’d expect that you are waiting for a particular book, and it didn’t come in today. Somehow, there is a difference between the absence of a book and the absence of any books, even though in fact there are zero books in either case.
Yes, I think (2) is sort of like saying "not even 1" and more likely a response to someone saying there is a book, whereas (1) is a more common phrasing and is just saying how many books there are.
no book -> not a book
Something can be “a book” on the subject, or “the book” on the subject in the sense of the one commonly accepted authoritative reference. I read the above as referring to those two senses respectively.
It’s because you’re talking about absence or the negation of presence.
You’re sentences say:
1. There are not any books on the subject.
2. There is not a single book on the subject.
(1) uses the absence of multiple and (2) uses the absence of single. Neither actually uses zero even though the quantity indicated is zero.
"0" is the same thing as "no" and thus it is a negation of something. Why would you remove the plural from something if your intention is to negate it? If someone drinks your beers, then you have no beers because it's a negation of multiple beers. If you don't know how many beers there were then it's likely there was more than one anyway.
ps: we can also say the beers were mutiplied by 0.
"0 x" is only valid if x is a countable noun.
"No x" is valid for any noun.
Liquids are an example of non-countable nouns - "I have no water" but "I have zero oranges."
Some thoughts:
- English requires the use of an article with singular nouns, because the question of "which X" is important.
- This question is impossible for plural nouns (no "which X" when X is 2 or more), and where the noun doesn't actually exist - because it's meant as a type or because it physically doesn't exist.
- So these situations require no article to be used.
- English is so flexible that a phrase like "two oranges" can be "singularized" and therefore a sentence like this is possible: "Take the two oranges and put them here." What's implied and meant here is "1 group of two oranges" so it's still consistent.
- That's all brought up because it's another place in the language where zero and plural obey the same logic.
I suspect it is the difference between saying “1 book” and “none of the books”. The former is singling out a single book, but saying zero books is highlighting the negative of all books. Ergo, “0 books” is plural, because it is excluding all the books instead of including a specific subset.
Question from someone whose native language is not English.
I often come across sentences that combine "There is no" with a plural direct object, such as:
"There is no books on this subject"
Is this also correct English?
No, you still need subject-verb agreement. Either “there are no books,” or the less common “there is no book.”
You might see the latter in the case of a definite subject: “Pass me the book on the subject.” “There is no book on the subject.”
Not in standard American English to the best of my knowledge, but it’s not impossible some dialects use this construction.
French, which treats zero as a singular I believe has a weird way of saying "no one"
Personne on its own means ''no one'', but une personne means a person.
IIRC, formally "personne" has to be used with the "ne" negation in order to mean 'nobody', such as "personne ne l'a vu", which makes a certain kind of sense ('a person hasn't seen it' -> nobody has seen it). But French people usually drop "ne" in spoken language.
And "rien" (nothing) used to mean something (via latin "res")
I use Xero's books.
Zeno’s book keeps eluding me, I keep getting halfway closer to finishing it
Be careful. That could be a violation of the DMCA, unless you do that one chapter at a time.
"There isn't a book on this subject"
I think it extends from whatever rules govern the much-more-influential word "No", particularly for items which aren't normally capped at 1.
Notice how these are all plural, and in each case "no" could be substituted with "zero":
* "My shelf contains no books."
* "Snails have no legs."
* "What if there were no stars in the sky?"
You can't simply replace those examples with a singular noun: You're either forced to refactor the grammar or you end up with something that sounds weird/archaic. Ex:
* "My shelf contains no book." [Weird/archaic]
* "My shelf does not contain a book. [Refactored]
You are using examples which are typically plural. Consider instead these singular forms:
"My shelf contains no Elf-on-a-Shelf" / "My shelf contains no elephant" / "My shelf contains no Hemingway book." / "My shelf contains no book by Hemingway."
(For an example of the third: "Don't look there for a copy of 'The Old Man and the Sea'? I detest Hemingway, and my shelf contains no Hemingway book." In this case, 'no' means something like 'not even one'.)
As for the others, "legs" rarely come in a singular form. There is (usually) only one king for an entire population, and there is (usually) only one soul per creature, so these singular forms are just fine:
"Snails have no king." / "Snails have no soul."
There's usually a lot of stars, but our solar system has but one sun, making the following singular form just fine:
"What if there were no sun in the sky?"
The 'correct' English is "no books by Hemmingway"
“My shelf contains no book” almost wants to become “my shelf contains no such book!” to my eye. Like the book is cursed or forbidden, haha.
"My car has no steering wheel", though, so isn't it related to how many you'd expect?
I'd say steering wheels are "normally capped at 1"... although I recall one distinct occasion where I expected two steering wheels, in a training car for new drivers. Alas, it seemed the local school-district could only afford a car with a second brake-pedal for the instructor, which did very little to help my anxieties.
So my first time behind the (singular) wheel and they told me to pull onto a major street next to the school, without even doing circles in a parking lot or anything. I guess they just expected most students had already done some illicit/private driving? Anywho, it was more stressful than any rollercoaster and I had shaky legs when my turn was finally over.
(Then I put an onion on my belt, as was the style of the time...)
Exactly right. Op uses “snails have no legs” because most things have 2+ legs or none. But snails do have one foot. If there was a snail without a foot, you’d say “this one has no foot”
> You can't naively rewrite those examples with a singular
"What if there was no star in the sky?" does not sound particularly weird, and we can find instances of people using that exact phrase. If we focus on the key aspect of that statement, "no star in the sky" appears to be commonly used.
It is possible I’ve made a completely imaginary link, but “no star in the sky” sounds slightly odd but in a poetic way. In particular “no star” seems pretty close to “not a star.” I mean, zero stars is technically zero stars.
But if someone says “There was no star in the sky,” I parse that as something like: An astonishingly dark night, I searched the sky quite carefully and found not even one star.
Meanwhile I parse “no stars in the sky” as: a very dark night, I didn’t see any stars.
Of course really, it is always a matter of degree technically, right? The stars are always there. They are just sometimes attenuated to the point where your eye doesn’t detect them.
> "What if there was no star in the sky?" does not sound particularly weird
I disagree: The most-charitable scenario I can think of is that someone has context-shifted from regular "stars" to "our sun, Sol, which is technically a star even though we typically consider it separate from the rest."
In other words, it involves a situation where someone is assuming the amount is capped at 1. (Yes, I know binary stars exist.)
Compare:
* "What if there was no star for Earth to orbit?" [Works because =1 is the normal assumption in this context]
* "What if there was no star in the night sky?" [This is weird.]
* "What if there was no constellation?" [This is also weird.]
It sounds natural to me only if you're expecting exactly one star. For example:
The Three Wise Men are back. But this time, there's no star in the sky to guide them.
This example does sound wrong to a native English speaker. It contains a subjunctive mood construct and the correct version would be:
"What if there were no stars in the sky?"
I'm not seeing a "zero" in there that would allow us to test if it can be replaced with "no."
I would not expect that no->zero is, er, grammatically symmetric to zero->no.
I have no idea what you are talking about. /s
More interesting is to compare languages. Other than native English, I only know Hindi (plural zero) and French (singular zero).
I wonder what and why the divide is, perhaps especially when among these three at least I believe zero has a common conceptual origin in al-Khvārizmī (post Roman).
In Hebrew there's a dual beside singular and plural. It's used for things / body parts that come in twos, like legs, pants, scissors etc. Typically, these same nouns don't have a proper plural form, or the plural form is very rarely used / means something else.
It's a little weird to use Hebrew word for zero to say that one doesn't have something: it feels like it's been copied from English, but not weird enough for native speakers not to use it. So, when someone says "there are zero pants in the shop", they'd use the dual form.
In other situations, when nouns have typical singular and plural forms, and one uses "zero" to mean that there are none available, then most of the time, they'd use plural, except for cases where singular can stand for plural, which is typical for units, currency, "times". So, while maybe not grammatically correct enough to write in a book, it doesn't sound foreign to say "zero meter" to mean "very close" or "zero shekel" to mean "free of charge".
Russian and relatives act very similar to English in this regard: I cannot think of a case where it would've been OK to use "zero" with singular noun (outside of nouns that don't have plural form). But using "zero" in this context is not a natural way for anyone to describe the absence of thing. It usually sounds as if the speaker wants to prank the listener who probably expected a non-zero value. Similar to how it would sound if in English you'd use negative numbers for the same purpose: "I have negative one apple" is, I suppose, grammatically correct, but isn't a phrase you'd expect if asking anyone about the number of apples they have.
In Turkish, numbers don’t affect plurality: 0 apple, 1 apple, 2 apple. But you still say “I ate all the apples” in plural.
To nitpick, French uses both
https://dictionnaire.lerobert.com/guide/accord-du-nom-apres-...
On the more general point, as I understand it comes down to what the speakers expect for the quantity. If it is generally expected to be plural, zero will probably be plural as well, if singular is more usual zero will follow.
You...want to know how zero is divided?
Russian has singular, plural and paucal (reserved for small numbers: 2-4). Interestingly, zero is plural, not paucal:
but:Also 101 becomes singular again, as on "101 kot".
There are websites that capture these rules for all common languages, to assist localization and translators.
https://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/localization-guide/...
English is
nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);
Russian is much more complex:
nplurals=3; plural=(n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2);
Same in Serbo-Croatian: 1 mačka 2-4 mačke 5+ mačaka 0 mačaka
Because zero is not singular. In the context of English grammar, "plural" simply means "not singular."
Funnily enough even negative one is not singular. A debt of a single dollar is negative one dollars in your account.
Except...
> `1.0` books (?) – Martin Ba Commented May 22, 2024 at 13:3
:)
I actually didn't know this so it's new to me but maybe I'm missing the nuances of English..
There is only 1 quantity in 0.. Or inversely there is a singular ABSENSE of a quantity. So how it's explained in the answer doesn't really explain it for me.
Edit: I also have a problem understanding "On accident" when for me it's surely "By accident". English is strange.
Incidentally i see 'on accident' more from Americans. In British English we tend to use 'by', so 'on' sounds a little strange but I've grown to like it recently.
The answer is that’s just the way English is. Exactly 1 is singular, everything else is plural (mostly).
“On accident” is American English, as a British English speaker I’d consider it a grammatical mistake. The same goes with “I forgot it at home” and similar constructs. However they’re correct American English.
Firstly, that is your interpretation of zero. It is also an abscence of all the possible values that it could be, which is a plural concept.
Secondly, yeah American English is moronic and full of barstadised phrases. In the UK, we always say "by accident". We also say "I couldn't care less" not "I could care less", the American version which is illogical. If the meaning is to be "I care the minimum amount possible", then only "I couldn't care less" makes sense. The American version implies that you actually care a significant amount.
It seems that from the large variation in the way different languages treat zero, there's no significant rationale behind whether it's plural or not, apart from following some existing (and ultimately also ad-hoc) pattern.
It's just the way that people (via social mechanisms - mostly mimicry) standardized expressing the absence of something.
Funny that 1 litre is singular but 1.0 lires is plural even though 1.0 is more precisely singular than 1.
IOW, English is screwy
I disagree 1.0 is more precise one than 1.
Both in speaking language, and in quite some programming languages "1" is assumed to be an integer, and "1.0" is assumed to be a number with one decimal (something akin to a float). And I'd say integer "1" is the most precise type of one.
If we are rounding numbers you are right though...
round_to_int(0.5000000 to 1.499999) -> 1
round_to_one_decimal(0.9500000 to 1.049999) -> 1.0
I might just take it that the special case is more for the word 'one', not the value of one.
Or perhaps more for one of a discreet object, where the litre is considered as a single thing but 1.0 is implying a continuous measurement so it changes how we think of it?
It’s the same in German. Not for liter because the German Liter is also its plural form.
If you write it out as "one litre" vs. "one point zero litres" it becomes a little bit more consistent though.
1 feet long cable.
10 foot long pole.
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I am not sure that it's a function of English language per se. I speak several language and it's the same story with all of them and one of those languages is Slavic so it comes from a very different root. That said, Greece is a rock throw away and I think the ancient Greek mathematicians(Pythagoras primarily) might have something to do with it: The Egyptians were the first known to use symbols to represents parts of something but it wasn't until the Greeks introduced fractions to express a quantifiable representation of sub-divisions of a unit, making the sub-division it's own unit: you need 4 * 1/4-th's of something to make it to 1 complete unit.
Then again, I could be wrong.
In Italy we would translate "two 2s, zero 3s, and one 5" as "due 2, zero 3 e un 5". No plurals for the numbers. By the way "un" is the "a" article and not the "uno" number. Using the number would sound more than strange.
Languages are just what they settled down to be, until they change little by little every day.
In French, the official rule from our (way too expensive) Académie Française is, that it's plural if you have at least x of it, where |x|≥2.
The Académie française does not edict official rules. Nobody does, there is no official governing authority for the French language but the ministry of Education is the main reference in France. Their rules are generally used for official documents, and since they decide what gets taught to children that's what becomes the normal language when the children become adults.
Also, it costs about 1 million euros per year[0], I wouldn't call that very expensive on the scale of a country like France. Even if it's absolutely useless.
In practice, zero is normally singular in French unless you want to show that there is none of a number of things ("zéro produits artificiels", "zéro émissions").
[0]https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2017/12/14/bonjour-combi...
Would anyone, even a member of the Academy, write "il y a 1.33 femme pour chaque homme"?
What would it mean for x to be negative, if x is how many of something you have?
I figured it is because most things in nature exist in multitudes, so there being 0 indicates an absence of multitude.
For example: There are trees in this field. There are 0 trees in this field.
Singular is the special case, similar to square x rectangle relation.
This matches my intuition. Zero is synonymous with "the absence of any X".
The singular equivalent would be perhaps "non-" or "-less".
Hot take: zero is a math concept and math deals with multitudes only (even under one, you're dealing with a multitude of parts). The actual irregularity is the usage of singular noun form in a math context.
“I found a body with no head.” (singular)
“I found a body with no legs.” (plural)
As opposed to: “I found a body with no heads.” (Weird alien concept!)
“I found a body with no leg.” (Ambiguous meaning)
“I found a body with no left leg.” (Zero of “left leg” is not plural, while “zero of leg” is plural.)
Consider, Alien Crimescene show: I found a body. Someone had chopped off the leftmost head. The remaining heads stared at me with their 47 dead eyes.
Oh trigger warning, gore, btw.
So here's a modern Greek perspective to add to the choir. In modern Greek zero is indeed plural, you would say 0 βαθμοί for example to say 0 degrees. However, in contrast to English:
1.5 books ενάμιση βιβλίο -- singular!
You are functionally saying something closer to "a book and a half" in english I guess! Actually this is an interesting duality in english: 1.5 books but a book and a half. Guess it depends on how "separate" linguistically the numbers are: is it one book and a half book or is it a single quantity? Greek for decimals between 1 and 2 picks the "two quantities" approach.
Because zero is not singular.
If you take singular as equal to 1 and plural as the opposite of singular it‘s obvious
There is 0.9 (repeating) apple.
edit:
Math is very precise, and has very obvious correct and incorrect answers. Language much less so. So when we have a question like this, it FEELS like there should be an obvious and precise answer because we are talking about math, BUT we are using language to talk about math, so we are going back to an imprecise realm; which may feel confusing and wrong.
This is also the effect behind the engagement bait word problems and order of operations problems you see on social media.
None of the answers give a really satisfactory answer for the underlying reason.
I have a theory, although I don't have any evidence. Zero is arelatively recent concept, and probably became part of the language after the rules for pluralization were well established. So when zero came into use it was used similar to negating a plural, like "no widgets" or "not any widgets", so the plural was used. Or maybe it felt unnatural to use singular with a number other than one.
Wikipedia tells me that the first known usage of "zero" in English was 1598, certainly well after the rules for plurals were set.
Wikipedia also tells me that people started speaking what we now call Old English around 450, and also tells me that there were examples of something close to the idea of "zero" going back as far as 1770BC, although the usual history of "zero" in English just goes back to borrowing it from Sanskrit, where it might have first appeared as early as ~300±80 but definitely appeared in 458.
I'm curious how much of the answer to this is simply because it sounds nicer? That is, the search is largely for technical reasons for something to be so. But, couldn't it just as realistically be that it is an aesthetic path that leads to this?
I see one of the comments says it rolls off the tongue nicely. I feel that that is far far more of the reason than people are opting for in the rest of the discussions.
That it sounds nicer is equivalent to saying that a native speaker uses it this way. There's no why to it; language evolves based on how it is used. The aesthetics are downstream of the fact that this is the way that native speakers use it.
The question is whether there is a rule that we can use to determine the correct way to modify the noun which it modifies. And the answer is ... sort of?
As an argument against the pure aesthetic argument (in the sense that maybe the usage of it is driven by superior aesthetics) we can find some counterexamples. We can say "there are zero marks on this ruler" and we can also say "here is the zero mark on this ruler". Both of these sentences make perfect sense and are immediately parsable by a native speaker. "There is zero mark on this ruler" and "here is the zero marks on this ruler" are clearly both wrong. The difference here is that in one case we are using "zero" to refer to a quantity and in the other to a non-quantity.
Apropos of which I learned today that some languages have not merely a plural, but a whole complex of representations for cardinality, including rather more of the counting values than I expected, and variations for uncertainty and optionality (some might say, superposition).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number#Types_of_nu...
In French 0 is singular. Plurals are complicated. See https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/42/supplemental/language....
' “I have no legs” means that I have 0 legs (as opposed to 1 leg or 2 legs), while “I have no leg” means that I have not any leg (i.e., I do not have any leg) ' made me laugh :D
Edit: To be honest, I don't see the difference between "I have 0 legs" and "I do not have any leg", can someone explain?
> I do not have any leg
I’m not sure what you’re saying, that isn’t grammatically correct.
Because it's not singular (ba-dum-tss)
In Portuguese, where -2 < x < 2, x is singular.
This is true at least in Brazil though I'm fairly certain it's shared grammar with the descendants of the European barbarians who invaded it in the 1500s.Two thoughts
1) Zero is expressing the absence of any, and its singular "just one" that is a special case
2) Plurality of zero is inconsistent with a lot of more modern creates using singular - zero carb, zero tolerance, etc. In these cases it does look like they simply substituted the word "zero" in for "no".
Incorrectly top voted answers. "zeroes" is the plural form. The use of zero in "zero 3s" is not the number 0 but an adjective, synonym to "no" in that context.
The correct answer is the third one: https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/352496
I guess this is one of the reasons for the failing popularity of the Stack Exchange sites, simply voted best answers that are incorrect.
Similar to how you will find 30 incorrect upvoted seemingly correct-but-actually-incorrect answers to many reddit questions with the correct answer hidden deep down in the comments with no karma.
Similar how HN is turning out lately, too.
Related: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover...
This is incredibly confusing. Of course the plural of zero (as a noun) is zero(e)s. But then you state that you understand that it's not about the noun, and still go on to say that the answers sharing your view are wrong..?
I think you're misunderstanding the question — possibly for comedic effect (?), it's hard to tell.
"zeroes" is the plural form of the noun "zero", yes. But the question is about using the form "zero" as an adjective and how that should affect the plurality of the noun it applies to: "zero book(s)", for example.
The body of the question makes it abundantly clear what the OP is asking, which has nothing to do with the plural form of the noun "zero". You could suggest an improvement to the title, but answering "zeroes" and pretending it's the only correct answer is being deliberately obtuse.
The obvious answer is: because zero is not one. Singular means one. Plural means not one.
All even numbers are plural ;-)
As are all primes!
Ah yes, I'd like three cake please, and 5 cup of coffee.
The better question is why do we refer to quantities as plural if they do not necessarily need a plurality?
Take this sentence:
> There is x candy on the counter.
Now you know that x is 1.
If 0 were not plural, then you wouldn't know that. Therefore it is useful that 0 is plural.
People who claim that zero / no is always followed by the plural have zero / no clues what's going on.
Did you mean "why are zero plural"?
There is no spoon
"I have no spoon." Correct in a situation where exactly one spoon is expected.
"There are no spoons here." Correct in a situation where there could be zero, one or more spoons.
That's because it would get stuck when it's below zero centigrade.
"Why are zero plural?"
Now do "maths"
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Why are zero plural /s
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This is a question about the English language from someone learning the language, not a math question.
The answer is obviously because programmers want to be able to write
I rather like Greek for having a dual form as well as a singular and plural form. (Translators made me add dual-form messages as well as singular and plural form messages).
> This looks like proof by assertion
It’s not a proof at all, by anything. It’s a description of the singular / plural distinction in English.
> Linguistic tautology is not mathematics. That way lies madness.
Singular vs. plural is not a mathematical fact, it’s a linguistic fact. I’m sorry you consider that bollocks.
> The second example I give of "zero threes" does not imply that three is plural. If anything it merely implies belonging or associativity in a linguistic sense and certainly not a maths sense.
It absolutely does denote plurality. "0 threes" uses "three" in the plural form and "1 three" uses "three" in a singular form.
Thus is not a question about math, but about linguistics.
I find your tone excessive here and expect better from hn. It's just a question and a semi-interesting one at that.