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.
Counting words and 们 aren't the same, as they aren't declensions. You add on the syllable rather than actually changing the syllable of the noun itself.
Granted, that's still different from saying that Mandarin doesn't have a concept of plural, but I think the underlying point- no conjugation or declension- is very different from the other languages being discussed.
To be more accurate, 们 isn't a plural marker more because of the fact that it's not productive[1], rather than the fact that Chinese doesn't have declension. If 们 were able to be suffixed to any noun to make it plural, then you could consider it to be a plural marker, even though the noun isn't technically declined. That's not the case anyway though, since 们 can only be used with a closed set of pronouns or in a limited way to refer to groups represented by the noun its attached to (in this sense it's more of a metonymic[2] marker rather than a plural marker). For example, 白宮们 can be used to translate "the White House" when it refers to the President and his administration, and cannot be used to mean "white houses".
It is productive. It can't pluralize anything, but it can pluralize anything that refers to people and it is actively used in novel ways. I've seen someone refer to 美国的妈妈们; metonymy is not involved there. It just means "American mothers", as distinct from a hypothetical 美国的妈妈 "America's mother".
However, the other angle on this is that Mandarin pronouns have singular and plural forms (plurals using 们), and the use of the correct form is obligatory, which suffices to show that plurality exists in the language. Although it isn't the case that 们 is unproductive, even if it was unproductive that still wouldn't show that the language has no plurals.
> in this sense it's more of a metonymic marker rather than a plural marker). For example, 白宮们 can be used to translate "the White House" when it refers to the President and his administration, and cannot be used to mean "white houses"
I should note that this argument doesn't entirely hang together. You can make "the White House" explicitly plural in English by giving it a plural verb:
When the comment you replied to mentioned "Chinese has gotten by for thousands of years without any plurals at all", I understood it to mean that Chinese has not featured any general system of marking plural by grammatical means[1], which is what is usually understood by the term "plural"[2], not that Chinese has no ability to express a more-than-one count distinction at all (which isn't the case in any language as far as I'm aware).
> It can't pluralize anything, but it can pluralize anything that refers to people and it is actively used in novel ways. I've seen someone refer to 美国的妈妈们; metonymy is not involved there.
It is productive in a limited sense in that way, but not as a general plural marker as you're arguing, and it's limited because 美国的妈妈们 means "American mothers" in that it necessarily refers to them as a collective group (which I argue is an instance of metonymy) rather than a set of more than one "American mother". For instance you cannot say *三个美国的妈妈们 to mean "three American mothers"; you must instead say 三个美国的妈妈 because 美国的妈妈们 can only ever refer to the entire collective group.
> I should note that this argument doesn't entirely hang together. You can make "the White House" explicitly plural in English by giving it a plural verb
This is a feature of UK English where collective nouns agree with plural forms of verbs. US English on the other hand, requires the singular form[3][4]. This has no bearing on how we analyze Chinese.
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.
FWIW, both "½ książek" and "½ książki" are valid Polish, but they mean different things:
- "½ książek" == "połowa książek" == "half of the books", and refers to half of some set, e.g. "połowa książek spadła z półki", "half of the books fell off the shelf". It gets tricky when the set turns out to contain only one book, but that's not spelling/grammar issue anymore.
- "½ książki" == "pół książki" or "połowa książki" == "half of the book", as in "pierwszap połowa tej książki jest nudna", "the first half of this book is boring". There's some difference between "pół" and "połowa" that makes them not interchangeable in most cases, but I don't feel confident enough to articulate a rule here.
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.
Typically used in "les petits riens de la vie", meaning the small things in life that may be overlooked but constitute the true things that make it worth living.
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 think the original sentence was already pretty weird, since I wouldn't say "My shelf contains no books." making it hard for me to judge what is not weird.
However, "Does your shelf contain a book by Hemingway?" sounds equally correct to "No, my shelf contains no book by Hemingway."
And equally correct to "My shelf contains no books."
Upon review, I realized the parallel construction in "No, my shelf contains no book by Hemingway, but it does contain one by Hemmingway" would help smooth things out.
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...)
In France, training cars have only one steering wheel, and the instructor is perfectly able to drive the vehicle by steering with his extended left arm.
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.
All of this is meaningless without the context found around the usage, of course, being that the language is entirely dependent on context. But let's assume for the sake of discussion a context of us both standing side by side looking at the night sky.
If I said "There is no star in the sky", are you going to be unclear about what I am trying to say, yet understand me perfectly if I said "There are no stars in the sky"?
> "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.]
"All birds have eyes" != "All things that have eyes are birds."
My hypothesis is that wherever we speak about "zero" and some quantity, it seems like we can substitute "no", and the pluralization rules we'd use for "no" are being inherited.
In contrast, it sounds like you're going the opposite direction, starting with sentences that contain "no" where we cannot drop-in "zero". For example, "No star in the sky is green" cannot become "Zero star in the sky is green."
> If I say all rodents are mammals, you can't disprove that just by pointing out the existence of dogs and cats.
Without a full understanding of the intent and background behind that statement that is not clear. It might be disprovable under some circumstances. If we take it to the logical extreme, the words absolutely could be defined such that it is disprovable, so it obviously could be.
Is that likely? In this case, probably not, but it becomes more likely when there is more fractured use. Consider tech jargon. The marjory of the discussions on HN are parties talking past each other because they came with different understandings of what words/phrases mean.
> "No star in the sky is green"
I wrote "No star in the sky<period>" to try and steer us away from different contexts. While I acknowledge that such usage also exists, that is outside of what I was trying to refer to and I think you will agree that in your interpretation that usage is not in line with what we are talking about.
Such is the downfall of languages made up on the spot as they are used. All you can do is try and convey something to the recipient, and sometimes you'll fail. This ended up being a great example of exactly what we're talking about!
There are? A quick search in DDG didn’t find any examples. However I did get multiple examples of “stars” (plural).
While English is defined by use, that doesn’t mean that all forms of slang automatically become grammatically correct.
For example: “no star in the sky” might be common vernacular in some regions but it wouldn’t be appropriate to use in formal writing. It’s also not a phrasing I’ve encountered before.
> we can find untold examples of "No star in the sky."
But the original example was "What if there was no star in the sky?" so your example is irrelevant. The original example sounds weird (to me, a native speaker). But "No star in the sky is a triangle" sounds OK and contains your example phrase.
"What if there were no star in the sky?" also works even if you want to use the subjunctive.
Note that not all native speakers of English use or prefer this type of construction. Also, this use of "were" instead of "was" is sometimes now called irrealis and considered separate from the subjunctive (which is then used to refer only to constructions like "it's important that you be here early tomorrow").
It doesn't really. I'd immediately think "what about the rest of them?". "Not a star" works, but that's because it is made indefinite by the article. I wonder if the point here is that in English, dropping the article implies "the" in a way it doesn't in other languages.
At the end of the day there is only "the reader understands" and "the reader does not understand", with the former being the goal of the author. There is some benefit in using what is conventional to help achieve the desired outcome, but beyond that it matters not.
[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.
Yeah "on accident" jumps out as wrong to me (a Canadian) but I can appreciate this it is symmetric with "on purpose". I've never heard anyone say "by purpose".
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.
I think the reason that "accident" is confusing is because of "I did it on purpose". As a fellow British English speaker, I would never say "by purpose!". By and large, I think that US English tends to be more logical.
"I wrote them" doesn't sound completely wrong to a British ear - it just gets misunderstood! I thought it sounded like exactly the correct way to say "I wrote the letters", until I got to the last couple of words in your post and had to reinterpret it. :-)
Quite, I struggled to formulate the example because indeed reading it the interpretation is that "them" could mean letters, and so doesn't sound completely as wrong as it does in the context of a person.
A better example would have been "I wrote Alice last week". Correct US English, utterly grating to British English. ( Technically still might not grate if your brain jumps to Alice being a Poem or other work of art! )
Because in British English we write letters, we don't write people. I don't know the term for it, it's not transitive vs intransitive, it's the verb object having a different restriction.
In my example, the "them" isn't referring to the recipients of the letters. It's referring to the letters themselves.
Mallory: "The mill received a series of letters. Those letters are evidence. Now, we're not leaving here until I find out who wrote those letters. Alice, did you write them? Bob, did you?"
"I left it at home" is common, but doesn't have the exact same meaning. Tbh, I don't think there really is a way to say that succinctly in British English—we would probably say "I left it at home", "I forgot to bring it", or—if the full meaning is strictly necessary—"I forgot it, it's at home".
Really, "I forgot it at home" is short for "I forgot to bring it; I left it at home".
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.
I'm saying this in comparison to other forms of English. In comparison to their British English versions, these phrases make no logical sense. That is just true. There's a direct analogue to compare it to.
Edit: Also, Americans themselves have complained to me that British English is too fancy. And when I look at the sentences they are describing, it's just someone using an unremarkably intelligent and varied vocabulary. Meanwhile, educated American public figures speak like they are talking to children. Im not even talking about someone as verbally challenged as the current president. By their own admission, it seems that American English is a dumbed-down variant.
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
It depends on the context/subtext: Is the other person trying to communicate something extra by adding the .0 portion?
Some are, some aren't. A programmer might use it to distinguish a data-type even though they are otherwise equal, an engineer might use it for significant-figures, etc.
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?
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").
> they often make blog posts in which they clarify how they want "proper french" to look like.
Anybody has the right to do that, they're mostly writers so they have an opinion on the language, but at the same time they're not linguists so they can't really be a prescriptive source. They just give their (usually reactionary) opinion.
I was just making clear that they don't make the rules. The Ministry of Education kinda does, and is often at odds with the Académie especially when it comes to the orthography reforms.
Sure, the temperature can be negative, but I'd have trouble understanding that as "I have -2 degrees" (and, if I'm understanding the French correctly, that's not what it means even literally).
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.
I speak Spanish, but it's a different story there: "dos doses, zero treses y un cinco". Numbers can have plurals, which from what I understand is not the case in Italian. Weird cause the languages are very similar in general - I can somewhat easily understand Italian, particularly reading. Listening - not so much. But as far as grammar, they seem to be almost identical. Same with French grammar though Spanish has the equivalent of the English present continuous tense and French does not(also worth mentioning that I don't speak French either, that's what my mum has told me).
Linguistically, Spanish and French are Western Romance languages and technically should be closer to each other than Spanish and Italian. However, French also underwent certain significant changes (possibly due to Germanic and/or Celtic influence) that most other Romance languages didn't, hence why it seems more "foreign". But there are a lot of common things between French and Spanish that Italian doesn't share (e.g. the way plurals are formed with "s", or particular sound changes, like adding "e" in front of certain consonant clusters, c.f. Spanish "estrella", French "étoile", but Italian "stella")
> But as far as grammar, they seem to be almost identical.
Apart from the different plurals, probably the biggest difference to me seems to be that Spanish has three different past tenses, including indefinido, while the corresponding tenses in Italian and French (passato remoto / passé simple) have completely fallen out of use except of highly formal contexts (or, in the case of Italian, certain Southern dialects). Instead you'd just use the perfect.
Well yeah... But overall numbers in French are a bit... Weird... By the time you are a teenager, you have the math skills of someone with a PhD in Calculus just to be able to say how old you are. No wonder some of the best mathematicians in history were French ;)
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.
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'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.
Sort of? The aesthetics are almost certainly driven by other factors, including what phonemes are used. Is why "ya'll" is a word in the south. It isn't like we didn't know how to say "you all" or other similar words. Aesthetically, contracting those into a single word was more pleasant for many people.
So, my argument is that you are looking at the words and distinguishing the singular/plural aspect as driving why we say certain things. I'm saying that you can use a phoneme argument for why "there is a zero mark" sounds correct and meaningful, whereas "there is zero marking on this ruler" starts to stretch it.
That is, allow me to rephrase my assertion. Rather than saying there is an aesthetic argument, I'm asserting that the phonemes involved are a larger driver than is given credit. Often with grammar rules backfilled to solidify choices.
' “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.
I am not trying to be funny. It seems to me that you are misunderstanding the usage of the word zero in this context, as in absence of any. Synonymous to "no", as in "no threes".
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.
It's not my place to critique your beliefs -- you may find Gödel's incompleteness theorem interesting to think about though. It was the end of the attempts to unify mathematics under a common set of axioms, as far as I know. I find it quite fascinating, personally.
There exist an infinite number of unprovable-but-true statements for any given set of axioms of sufficient complexity (e.g. arithmetic). I find it conceivable that having "more than one mathematics" would be quite practical!
The question is why is "0 results" correct. hyrix's answer is so that you have a simple equation for plural, my response is that if "0 result" was correct we would have an even simpler equation.
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).
Looking at that page, I’m not buying the claims. I’m not an expert on Slovene, but my understanding is that it only has singular, dual and plural and not the 3–4 special case (which seems to have been confused with other Slavic languages like Czech and Slovak). I don’t think their dual rule is correct for Slovene either.
I’m surprised about the higher in the conversation comment about Greek as the dual exists in Modern Greek only as a grammatical feature of the written form of the word for “two” and is rare in classical Greek.
Having three plural forms for Slavic languages is typical, e.g. Ukrainian and Russian have them. Roughly speaking, one form for numerals ending with "1", a different form for numerals ending in "2", "3", "4", and the third form for the rest of them (simplifying a bit).
> 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.
Counting words and 们 aren't the same, as they aren't declensions. You add on the syllable rather than actually changing the syllable of the noun itself.
Granted, that's still different from saying that Mandarin doesn't have a concept of plural, but I think the underlying point- no conjugation or declension- is very different from the other languages being discussed.
To be more accurate, 们 isn't a plural marker more because of the fact that it's not productive[1], rather than the fact that Chinese doesn't have declension. If 们 were able to be suffixed to any noun to make it plural, then you could consider it to be a plural marker, even though the noun isn't technically declined. That's not the case anyway though, since 们 can only be used with a closed set of pronouns or in a limited way to refer to groups represented by the noun its attached to (in this sense it's more of a metonymic[2] marker rather than a plural marker). For example, 白宮们 can be used to translate "the White House" when it refers to the President and his administration, and cannot be used to mean "white houses".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_(linguistics) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
It is productive. It can't pluralize anything, but it can pluralize anything that refers to people and it is actively used in novel ways. I've seen someone refer to 美国的妈妈们; metonymy is not involved there. It just means "American mothers", as distinct from a hypothetical 美国的妈妈 "America's mother".
However, the other angle on this is that Mandarin pronouns have singular and plural forms (plurals using 们), and the use of the correct form is obligatory, which suffices to show that plurality exists in the language. Although it isn't the case that 们 is unproductive, even if it was unproductive that still wouldn't show that the language has no plurals.
> in this sense it's more of a metonymic marker rather than a plural marker). For example, 白宮们 can be used to translate "the White House" when it refers to the President and his administration, and cannot be used to mean "white houses"
I should note that this argument doesn't entirely hang together. You can make "the White House" explicitly plural in English by giving it a plural verb:
https://us.iasservices.org.uk/bidens-immigration-bill-propos...
> The White House have announced a comprehensive immigration reform proposal in a bill that has been sent to congress.
How would you say that differs from 白宫们? Does it refer to multiple houses?
When the comment you replied to mentioned "Chinese has gotten by for thousands of years without any plurals at all", I understood it to mean that Chinese has not featured any general system of marking plural by grammatical means[1], which is what is usually understood by the term "plural"[2], not that Chinese has no ability to express a more-than-one count distinction at all (which isn't the case in any language as far as I'm aware).
> It can't pluralize anything, but it can pluralize anything that refers to people and it is actively used in novel ways. I've seen someone refer to 美国的妈妈们; metonymy is not involved there.
It is productive in a limited sense in that way, but not as a general plural marker as you're arguing, and it's limited because 美国的妈妈们 means "American mothers" in that it necessarily refers to them as a collective group (which I argue is an instance of metonymy) rather than a set of more than one "American mother". For instance you cannot say *三个美国的妈妈们 to mean "three American mothers"; you must instead say 三个美国的妈妈 because 美国的妈妈们 can only ever refer to the entire collective group.
> I should note that this argument doesn't entirely hang together. You can make "the White House" explicitly plural in English by giving it a plural verb
This is a feature of UK English where collective nouns agree with plural forms of verbs. US English on the other hand, requires the singular form[3][4]. This has no bearing on how we analyze Chinese.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural
[3] https://victoryediting.com/collective-nouns/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Examples_of_me...
Yeah, that was what I meant by including "counting words" which I now remember are better known as measure words or classifiers.
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.
FWIW, both "½ książek" and "½ książki" are valid Polish, but they mean different things:
- "½ książek" == "połowa książek" == "half of the books", and refers to half of some set, e.g. "połowa książek spadła z półki", "half of the books fell off the shelf". It gets tricky when the set turns out to contain only one book, but that's not spelling/grammar issue anymore.
- "½ książki" == "pół książki" or "połowa książki" == "half of the book", as in "pierwszap połowa tej książki jest nudna", "the first half of this book is boring". There's some difference between "pół" and "połowa" that makes them not interchangeable in most cases, but I don't feel confident enough to articulate a rule here.
Same in Russian and Ukrainian in that regard.
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.
> English requires the use of an article with singular nouns, because the question of "which X" is important.
Well, that obviously can't be true, or other languages would have the same requirement.
I guess I should have made that say "important to English."
Languages definitely impose "models" for various things and those are certainly different amongst each language.
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.
American English is shifting strongly in the direction of always using "is" when the subject is dummy "there".
It's also shifting to using schwa rather than FLEECE in "the" when it is followed by a vowel.
On the internet, the -en form of verbs seems to be disappearing entirely, with constructions like "I should have went [wherever]".
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.
You're right as far as I know. But it's also funny to type in both "nobody" and "anybody" into Google translate and they both translate to "personne".
“Sans personne” means “without anyone” and has no “ne”.
Ok, but it literally means "without person", so is equally unsuprising.
And "rien" (nothing) used to mean something (via latin "res")
"Un petit rien" => a small thing
Typically used in "les petits riens de la vie", meaning the small things in life that may be overlooked but constitute the true things that make it worth living.
The cognitive origins of these must be interesting. Rooted in our understanding of existence?
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"
That's "Hemingway" ;)
I think the original sentence was already pretty weird, since I wouldn't say "My shelf contains no books." making it hard for me to judge what is not weird.
However, "Does your shelf contain a book by Hemingway?" sounds equally correct to "No, my shelf contains no book by Hemingway."
And equally correct to "My shelf contains no books."
Upon review, I realized the parallel construction in "No, my shelf contains no book by Hemingway, but it does contain one by Hemmingway" would help smooth things out.
More to the point, https://archive.org/details/stephencranebiog00stal/page/40/m... has this real-world example: "Although Crane’s list of books at Brede Place contains no book by James Fenimore Cooper, he obviously knew his Cooper."
“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...)
The exceptions are always fun: https://imgs.classicfm.com/images/41395?crop=16_9&width=660&...
In France, training cars have only one steering wheel, and the instructor is perfectly able to drive the vehicle by steering with his extended left arm.
This is standard in the US as well, probably almost everywhere. But as the comment says, there's always an exception.
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.
All of this is meaningless without the context found around the usage, of course, being that the language is entirely dependent on context. But let's assume for the sake of discussion a context of us both standing side by side looking at the night sky.
If I said "There is no star in the sky", are you going to be unclear about what I am trying to say, yet understand me perfectly if I said "There are no stars in the sky"?
> "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.]
> I disagree
With what? English is defined by use, and we can find untold examples of "No star in the sky."
> we can find untold examples
"All birds have eyes" != "All things that have eyes are birds."
My hypothesis is that wherever we speak about "zero" and some quantity, it seems like we can substitute "no", and the pluralization rules we'd use for "no" are being inherited.
In contrast, it sounds like you're going the opposite direction, starting with sentences that contain "no" where we cannot drop-in "zero". For example, "No star in the sky is green" cannot become "Zero star in the sky is green."
> If I say all rodents are mammals, you can't disprove that just by pointing out the existence of dogs and cats.
Without a full understanding of the intent and background behind that statement that is not clear. It might be disprovable under some circumstances. If we take it to the logical extreme, the words absolutely could be defined such that it is disprovable, so it obviously could be.
Is that likely? In this case, probably not, but it becomes more likely when there is more fractured use. Consider tech jargon. The marjory of the discussions on HN are parties talking past each other because they came with different understandings of what words/phrases mean.
> "No star in the sky is green"
I wrote "No star in the sky<period>" to try and steer us away from different contexts. While I acknowledge that such usage also exists, that is outside of what I was trying to refer to and I think you will agree that in your interpretation that usage is not in line with what we are talking about.
Such is the downfall of languages made up on the spot as they are used. All you can do is try and convey something to the recipient, and sometimes you'll fail. This ended up being a great example of exactly what we're talking about!
There are? A quick search in DDG didn’t find any examples. However I did get multiple examples of “stars” (plural).
While English is defined by use, that doesn’t mean that all forms of slang automatically become grammatically correct.
For example: “no star in the sky” might be common vernacular in some regions but it wouldn’t be appropriate to use in formal writing. It’s also not a phrasing I’ve encountered before.
> we can find untold examples of "No star in the sky."
But the original example was "What if there was no star in the sky?" so your example is irrelevant. The original example sounds weird (to me, a native speaker). But "No star in the sky is a triangle" sounds OK and contains your example phrase.
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?"
"What if there were no star in the sky?" also works even if you want to use the subjunctive.
Note that not all native speakers of English use or prefer this type of construction. Also, this use of "were" instead of "was" is sometimes now called irrealis and considered separate from the subjunctive (which is then used to refer only to constructions like "it's important that you be here early tomorrow").
It doesn't really. I'd immediately think "what about the rest of them?". "Not a star" works, but that's because it is made indefinite by the article. I wonder if the point here is that in English, dropping the article implies "the" in a way it doesn't in other languages.
It may found in usage, but then so is "liek"..
At the end of the day there is accepted grammar and there is actual usage.
If you ask people for the accepted grammar they will give you something most people accept. Which is not "What if there were no star in the sky?"
At the end of the day there is only "the reader understands" and "the reader does not understand", with the former being the goal of the author. There is some benefit in using what is conventional to help achieve the desired outcome, but beyond that it matters not.
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.
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.
空
Isn't it usually 無 for zen koans?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
Ummon understood nothing.
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.
Irish is the same — you count with the singular noun, but use plural nouns elsewhere
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?
Everyone complains about not dividing by zero, but just multiply 0 by the inverse and everything is good.
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);
English has the same issue with ordinals. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th ... then back to 101st, 102nd.
Same in Serbo-Croatian: 1 mačka 2-4 mačke 5+ mačaka 0 mačaka
> Slavic family: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, Croatian
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#ind...
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.
Yeah "on accident" jumps out as wrong to me (a Canadian) but I can appreciate this it is symmetric with "on purpose". I've never heard anyone say "by purpose".
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.
I think the reason that "accident" is confusing is because of "I did it on purpose". As a fellow British English speaker, I would never say "by purpose!". By and large, I think that US English tends to be more logical.
There are a few things like this which really sound weird to a British ear.
Another example is the use of "Write" in the sentence, "I wrote them". This is completely wrong to the British ear, which would be "I wrote to them".
"I wrote them" doesn't sound completely wrong to a British ear - it just gets misunderstood! I thought it sounded like exactly the correct way to say "I wrote the letters", until I got to the last couple of words in your post and had to reinterpret it. :-)
Quite, I struggled to formulate the example because indeed reading it the interpretation is that "them" could mean letters, and so doesn't sound completely as wrong as it does in the context of a person.
A better example would have been "I wrote Alice last week". Correct US English, utterly grating to British English. ( Technically still might not grate if your brain jumps to Alice being a Poem or other work of art! )
Because in British English we write letters, we don't write people. I don't know the term for it, it's not transitive vs intransitive, it's the verb object having a different restriction.
It sounds wrong to this British ear.
"There was a problem at the mill so I wrote them" - this sounds wrong
"The mill workers were complaining so I wrote them a letter" - this is fine
"The mill workers were complaining so I wrote to them" - this is also fine
In my example, the "them" isn't referring to the recipients of the letters. It's referring to the letters themselves.
Mallory: "The mill received a series of letters. Those letters are evidence. Now, we're not leaving here until I find out who wrote those letters. Alice, did you write them? Bob, did you?"
Carol: "I wrote them."
> I forgot it at home
As a non-native speaker, I find the sentence equally disconcerting, but it leaves me wondering what one would use to say something to that effect.
"I left it at home" is common, but doesn't have the exact same meaning. Tbh, I don't think there really is a way to say that succinctly in British English—we would probably say "I left it at home", "I forgot to bring it", or—if the full meaning is strictly necessary—"I forgot it, it's at home".
Really, "I forgot it at home" is short for "I forgot to bring it; I left it at home".
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.
> American English is moronic and full of barstadised phrases.
Can you point out a human language that isn't full of bastardized phrases? I'm pretty sure that's universal, including British English.
I'm saying this in comparison to other forms of English. In comparison to their British English versions, these phrases make no logical sense. That is just true. There's a direct analogue to compare it to.
Edit: Also, Americans themselves have complained to me that British English is too fancy. And when I look at the sentences they are describing, it's just someone using an unremarkably intelligent and varied vocabulary. Meanwhile, educated American public figures speak like they are talking to children. Im not even talking about someone as verbally challenged as the current president. By their own admission, it seems that American English is a dumbed-down variant.
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
:)
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 disagree 1.0 is more precise one than 1.
It depends on the context/subtext: Is the other person trying to communicate something extra by adding the .0 portion?
Some are, some aren't. A programmer might use it to distinguish a data-type even though they are otherwise equal, an engineer might use it for significant-figures, etc.
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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Spelling.
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...
Last I heard it was closer to 5 millions, which regardless of the amount goes directly into the pockets of some reactionary old dudes.
They don't make a rule book, but they often make blog posts in which they clarify how they want "proper french" to look like.
> they often make blog posts in which they clarify how they want "proper french" to look like.
Anybody has the right to do that, they're mostly writers so they have an opinion on the language, but at the same time they're not linguists so they can't really be a prescriptive source. They just give their (usually reactionary) opinion.
I was just making clear that they don't make the rules. The Ministry of Education kinda does, and is often at odds with the Académie especially when it comes to the orthography reforms.
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?
You can have negative dollars.
"Il fait -2 degrés ce matin".
Sure, the temperature can be negative, but I'd have trouble understanding that as "I have -2 degrees" (and, if I'm understanding the French correctly, that's not what it means even literally).
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.
I speak Spanish, but it's a different story there: "dos doses, zero treses y un cinco". Numbers can have plurals, which from what I understand is not the case in Italian. Weird cause the languages are very similar in general - I can somewhat easily understand Italian, particularly reading. Listening - not so much. But as far as grammar, they seem to be almost identical. Same with French grammar though Spanish has the equivalent of the English present continuous tense and French does not(also worth mentioning that I don't speak French either, that's what my mum has told me).
Linguistically, Spanish and French are Western Romance languages and technically should be closer to each other than Spanish and Italian. However, French also underwent certain significant changes (possibly due to Germanic and/or Celtic influence) that most other Romance languages didn't, hence why it seems more "foreign". But there are a lot of common things between French and Spanish that Italian doesn't share (e.g. the way plurals are formed with "s", or particular sound changes, like adding "e" in front of certain consonant clusters, c.f. Spanish "estrella", French "étoile", but Italian "stella")
> But as far as grammar, they seem to be almost identical.
Apart from the different plurals, probably the biggest difference to me seems to be that Spanish has three different past tenses, including indefinido, while the corresponding tenses in Italian and French (passato remoto / passé simple) have completely fallen out of use except of highly formal contexts (or, in the case of Italian, certain Southern dialects). Instead you'd just use the perfect.
Well yeah... But overall numbers in French are a bit... Weird... By the time you are a teenager, you have the math skills of someone with a PhD in Calculus just to be able to say how old you are. No wonder some of the best mathematicians in history were French ;)
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.
Because zero is not singular.
If you take singular as equal to 1 and plural as the opposite of singular it‘s obvious
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.
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.
> there were examples of something close to the idea of "zero" going back as far as 1770BC
Ah, yes, I was thinking of in Europe, and as a number, but I failed to specify that.
I suspected as much, but felt like being pedantic. :)
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...
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.
Sort of? The aesthetics are almost certainly driven by other factors, including what phonemes are used. Is why "ya'll" is a word in the south. It isn't like we didn't know how to say "you all" or other similar words. Aesthetically, contracting those into a single word was more pleasant for many people.
So, my argument is that you are looking at the words and distinguishing the singular/plural aspect as driving why we say certain things. I'm saying that you can use a phoneme argument for why "there is a zero mark" sounds correct and meaningful, whereas "there is zero marking on this ruler" starts to stretch it.
That is, allow me to rephrase my assertion. Rather than saying there is an aesthetic argument, I'm asserting that the phonemes involved are a larger driver than is given credit. Often with grammar rules backfilled to solidify choices.
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.
I took it form one of the Stackexchange answers, I'm not sure what they're trying to say either.
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.Because it's not singular (ba-dum-tss)
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.
I am not trying to be funny. It seems to me that you are misunderstanding the usage of the word zero in this context, as in absence of any. Synonymous to "no", as in "no threes".
It is not about the number 0.
OK, if you think I'm the one misunderstanding the question, can you explain how?
The example in the question is:
> For example, if we choose two 2s, zero 3s, and one 5
That's talking about "zero 3s", not "three zeroes".
> That's talking about "zero 3s", not "three zeroes".
In this context "zero" is not a noun, but an adjective.
I was too quick to press post, and I updated my above comment after you replied to it.
In addition, see the adj. definition of zero: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/zero_n?tl=true#1209971660
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.
Huh? I thought I was being detailed.
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!
Sure, but that doesn't answer the question, as 0 is not prime.
Ah yes, I'd like three cake please, and 5 cup of coffee.
"A implies B" does not mean "B implies A".
Of course, but you're forgetting the context. In your world, OP's comment must be simply nonsense.
The sun is warm.
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.
The better question is why do we refer to quantities as plural if they do not necessarily need a plurality?
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.
There is no spoon in this room. Equivalent to "There are no spoons in this room".
The information they communicate about the number of spoons in the room is the same.
The information they communicate about the state of mind of the participants in the conversation is not the same.
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.
Why are gerdesj's maths plural but your math is singular? Does he know more maths than you?
Personally I believe that all math is connected, and just different aspects of the same math, so there is only one, like a monotheistic God.
It's not my place to critique your beliefs -- you may find Gödel's incompleteness theorem interesting to think about though. It was the end of the attempts to unify mathematics under a common set of axioms, as far as I know. I find it quite fascinating, personally.
There exist an infinite number of unprovable-but-true statements for any given set of axioms of sufficient complexity (e.g. arithmetic). I find it conceivable that having "more than one mathematics" would be quite practical!
The answer is obviously because programmers want to be able to write
Then they had best steer well clear of Poland.
Must be the same programmers that make it impossible for me to sign into places with all the diacritics in my name.
> f"{n} result{'s' if n == 1 else ''}"
n>1 is even shorter than n!=1
(also you wrote == instead of != your code is backwards)
But the whole point is that "0 result" is not correct but "0 results" is.
The question is why is "0 results" correct. hyrix's answer is so that you have a simple equation for plural, my response is that if "0 result" was correct we would have an even simpler equation.
That makes -infinity ... -1 singular too.
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).
Slovenian has four plural forms and Arabic has _six_. Here's a nice list with details and rules: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural...
Looking at that page, I’m not buying the claims. I’m not an expert on Slovene, but my understanding is that it only has singular, dual and plural and not the 3–4 special case (which seems to have been confused with other Slavic languages like Czech and Slovak). I don’t think their dual rule is correct for Slovene either.
I’m surprised about the higher in the conversation comment about Greek as the dual exists in Modern Greek only as a grammatical feature of the written form of the word for “two” and is rare in classical Greek.
Having three plural forms for Slavic languages is typical, e.g. Ukrainian and Russian have them. Roughly speaking, one form for numerals ending with "1", a different form for numerals ending in "2", "3", "4", and the third form for the rest of them (simplifying a bit).
Slovenian appears to have a special word form for numerals ending in "2". Looks like it's a remnant of the dual number that existed in early Slavic languages: https://study.2tm.eu/blogs/the-dual-number-in-the-slovenian-... And it is indeed unusual!
From the underlying data:
* 1 dan
* 2 dneva
* 3 dnevi
* 5 dni
https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/latest/supplemental/lang...
> 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.