alt Hacker News"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.