alt Hacker NewsWhy is zero plural? (2024)
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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"
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.
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]
Because zero is not singular. In the context of English grammar, "plural" simply means "not singular."
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.
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.
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.
Russian has singular, plural and paucal (reserved for small numbers: 2-4). Interestingly, zero is plural, not paucal:
1 kot "1 cat"
3 kota "3 cats"
5 kotov "5 cats"
0 kotov "0 cats"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).
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.
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.
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.
“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.
' “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?
Because it's not singular (ba-dum-tss)
Because zero is not singular.
If you take singular as equal to 1 and plural as the opposite of singular it‘s obvious
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".
In Portuguese, where -2 < x < 2, x is singular.
* 0 thing
* 0.5 thing
* -1.3 thing
* 1.99999 thing
* -2 things
* etc
People who claim that zero / no is always followed by the plural have zero / no clues what's going on.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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 obvious answer is: because zero is not one. Singular means one. Plural means not one.
Did you mean "why are zero plural"?
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.
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
"Why are zero plural?"
Now do "maths"
Why are zero plural /s
[dead]
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.