“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.
This looks like proof by assertion (and by logical extension - bollocks!):
"That is just how the language works. All numbers except exactly 1 are plural. Note that -1 can also be singular, but that depends on the context and dialect."
Three zeros and zero threes. It is a linguistic nicety/convention which is an idiom. The second example I give of "zero threes" does not imply that three is plural. If anything it merely implies belonging or associativity in a linguistic sense and certainly not a maths sense.
The notion of plural is a linguistic thing and might have a maths side line but I am not familiar with it. The assertion that all numbers (what does that even mean?) are plural except 1 (which one) is of course bollocks.
Linguistic tautology is not mathematics. That way lies madness.
Is this a Mathy April fool/fish thing?
This is a question about the English language from someone learning the language, not a math question.
Why are gerdesj's maths plural but your math is singular? Does he know more maths than you?
Personally I believe that all math is connected, and just different aspects of the same math, so there is only one, like a monotheistic God.
The answer is obviously because programmers want to be able to write
f”{n} result{‘s’ if n == 1 else ‘’}”Must be the same programmers that make it impossible for me to sign into places with all the diacritics in my name.
Then they had best steer well clear of Poland.
> f"{n} result{'s' if n == 1 else ''}"
n>1 is even shorter than n!=1
(also you wrote == instead of != your code is backwards)
But the whole point is that "0 result" is not correct but "0 results" is.
That makes -infinity ... -1 singular too.
> This looks like proof by assertion
It’s not a proof at all, by anything. It’s a description of the singular / plural distinction in English.
> Linguistic tautology is not mathematics. That way lies madness.
Singular vs. plural is not a mathematical fact, it’s a linguistic fact. I’m sorry you consider that bollocks.
I rather like Greek for having a dual form as well as a singular and plural form. (Translators made me add dual-form messages as well as singular and plural form messages).
Slovenian has four plural forms and Arabic has _six_. Here's a nice list with details and rules: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural...
Looking at that page, I’m not buying the claims. I’m not an expert on Slovene, but my understanding is that it only has singular, dual and plural and not the 3–4 special case (which seems to have been confused with other Slavic languages like Czech and Slovak). I don’t think their dual rule is correct for Slovene either.
I’m surprised about the higher in the conversation comment about Greek as the dual exists in Modern Greek only as a grammatical feature of the written form of the word for “two” and is rare in classical Greek.
From the underlying data:
* 1 dan
* 2 dneva
* 3 dnevi
* 5 dni
https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/latest/supplemental/lang...
Having three plural forms for Slavic languages is typical, e.g. Ukrainian and Russian have them. Roughly speaking, one form for numerals ending with "1", a different form for numerals ending in "2", "3", "4", and the third form for the rest of them (simplifying a bit).
Slovenian appears to have a special word form for numerals ending in "2". Looks like it's a remnant of the dual number that existed in early Slavic languages: https://study.2tm.eu/blogs/the-dual-number-in-the-slovenian-... And it is indeed unusual!
> The second example I give of "zero threes" does not imply that three is plural. If anything it merely implies belonging or associativity in a linguistic sense and certainly not a maths sense.
It absolutely does denote plurality. "0 threes" uses "three" in the plural form and "1 three" uses "three" in a singular form.
Thus is not a question about math, but about linguistics.
I find your tone excessive here and expect better from hn. It's just a question and a semi-interesting one at that.
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"
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.
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.
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.
I use Xero's books.
Zeno’s book keeps eluding me, I keep getting halfway closer to finishing it
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.
> 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.
> "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
"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!
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.
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").
[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]
⠀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
I have no idea what you are talking about. /s
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).
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.
In Turkish, numbers don’t affect plurality: 0 apple, 1 apple, 2 apple. But you still say “I ate all the apples” in plural.
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.
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. :)
Because zero is not singular.
If you take singular as equal to 1 and plural as the opposite of singular it‘s obvious
The obvious answer is: because zero is not one. Singular means one. Plural means not 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...
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.
"IOW, English is screwy"
OK, but what on earth is a lires? Speling?
If you are going to take the piss, please do it with some panache and deliver a bit of bite. Your comment needs a bit more thought and effort to deliver anything like a sucker punch.
1.0 indicates that a measurement has been made within a range. That's significant figures for the mathematicians/engineers/scientists. 1.0 and 1 are very different things but plurality is not an important concept that I know of.
Yes, English is nobs on daft but so are all other languages. All languages have idiosyncratic idioms (idia) and other daftness (when seen from the outside).
Spelling.
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.
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.
There is no spoon
"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".