alt Hacker NewsI'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.