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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
> "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.]
> 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.
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.
"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!
"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.
[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]
⠀
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 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 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.
"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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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 :)
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 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"
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
I use Xero's books.
Be careful. That could be a violation of the DMCA, unless you do that one chapter at a time.
Zeno’s book keeps eluding me, I keep getting halfway closer to finishing it
"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]
“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.
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.
> "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 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.
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
"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!
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 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?"
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.
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)
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"
I have no idea what you are talking about. /s
' “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 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
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Because it's not singular (ba-dum-tss)
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);
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...
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".
“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 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.
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.
Because zero is not singular.
If you take singular as equal to 1 and plural as the opposite of singular it‘s obvious
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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 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 obvious answer is: because zero is not one. Singular means one. Plural means not one.
Did you mean "why are zero plural"?
There is no spoon
That's because it would get stuck when it's below zero centigrade.
"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.
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 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.
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.
1 feet long cable.
10 foot long pole.
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".
"Why are zero plural?"