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"
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.
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?
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.
"There isn't a 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.