Why is zero plural? (2024)
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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.
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.
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.
- "½ książek" == "połowa książek" == "half of the books", and refers to half of some set, e.g. "połowa książek spadła z półki", "half of the books fell off the shelf". It gets tricky when the set turns out to contain only one book, but that's not spelling/grammar issue anymore.
- "½ książki" == "pół książki" or "połowa książki" == "half of the book", as in "pierwszap połowa tej książki jest nudna", "the first half of this book is boring". There's some difference between "pół" and "połowa" that makes them not interchangeable in most cases, but I don't feel confident enough to articulate a rule here.
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.
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 :)
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)
Languages with these features often have lots of irregularities around them, too. In the same way that "pants" are plural for no reason in English, eyes might be plural instead of the obvious-seeming dual, etc. And if that seems all a bit unnecessarily numerical, you may be right; Chinese has gotten by for thousands of years without any plurals at all.
Chinese has plurals; 们 has no other use.
Granted, that's still different from saying that Mandarin doesn't have a concept of plural, but I think the underlying point- no conjugation or declension- is very different from the other languages being discussed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_(linguistics) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
However, the other angle on this is that Mandarin pronouns have singular and plural forms (plurals using 们), and the use of the correct form is obligatory, which suffices to show that plurality exists in the language. Although it isn't the case that 们 is unproductive, even if it was unproductive that still wouldn't show that the language has no plurals.
> in this sense it's more of a metonymic marker rather than a plural marker). For example, 白宮们 can be used to translate "the White House" when it refers to the President and his administration, and cannot be used to mean "white houses"
I should note that this argument doesn't entirely hang together. You can make "the White House" explicitly plural in English by giving it a plural verb:
https://us.iasservices.org.uk/bidens-immigration-bill-propos...
> The White House have announced a comprehensive immigration reform proposal in a bill that has been sent to congress.
How would you say that differs from 白宫们? Does it refer to multiple houses?
> It can't pluralize anything, but it can pluralize anything that refers to people and it is actively used in novel ways. I've seen someone refer to 美国的妈妈们; metonymy is not involved there.
It is productive in a limited sense in that way, but not as a general plural marker as you're arguing, and it's limited because 美国的妈妈们 means "American mothers" in that it necessarily refers to them as a collective group (which I argue is an instance of metonymy) rather than a set of more than one "American mother". For instance you cannot say *三个美国的妈妈们 to mean "three American mothers"; you must instead say 三个美国的妈妈 because 美国的妈妈们 can only ever refer to the entire collective group.
> I should note that this argument doesn't entirely hang together. You can make "the White House" explicitly plural in English by giving it a plural verb
This is a feature of UK English where collective nouns agree with plural forms of verbs. US English on the other hand, requires the singular form[3][4]. This has no bearing on how we analyze Chinese.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural
[3] https://victoryediting.com/collective-nouns/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Examples_of_me...
EDIT: I know that some dialects of coastal croatian still retain this feature. But there may be more
So it's "Mam 3 książki" (I have 3 books) but "Nie mam 3 książek" (I don't have 3 books) or "Brakuje 3 książek" (3 books are missing).
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...
Interestingly, we can say either:
1. "There are no books on this subject"
2. "There is no book on this subject"
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.
Personne on its own means ''no one'', but une personne means a person.
Typically used in "les petits riens de la vie", meaning the small things in life that may be overlooked but constitute the true things that make it worth living.
ps: we can also say the beers were mutiplied by 0.
"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.
Well, that obviously can't be true, or other languages would have the same requirement.
Languages definitely impose "models" for various things and those are certainly different amongst each language.
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?
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.”
It's also shifting to using schwa rather than FLEECE in "the" when it is followed by a vowel.
On the internet, the -en form of verbs seems to be disappearing entirely, with constructions like "I should have went [wherever]".
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.
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]
"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 were no stars in the sky?"
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").
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?"
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.]
With what? English is defined by use, and we can find untold examples of "No star in the sky."
"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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
If I said "There is no star in the sky", are you going to be unclear about what I am trying to say, yet understand me perfectly if I said "There are no stars in the sky"?
The Three Wise Men are back. But this time, there's no star in the sky to guide them.
[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 would not expect that no->zero is, er, grammatically symmetric to zero->no.
"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?"
I think the original sentence was already pretty weird, since I wouldn't say "My shelf contains no books." making it hard for me to judge what is not weird.
However, "Does your shelf contain a book by Hemingway?" sounds equally correct to "No, my shelf contains no book by Hemingway."
And equally correct to "My shelf contains no books."
More to the point, https://archive.org/details/stephencranebiog00stal/page/40/m... has this real-world example: "Although Crane’s list of books at Brede Place contains no book by James Fenimore Cooper, he obviously knew his Cooper."
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...)
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).
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.
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 kot "1 cat"
3 kota "3 cats"
5 kotov "5 cats"
0 kotov "0 cats"https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#ind...
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);
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.
“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.
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.
Really, "I forgot it at home" is short for "I forgot to bring it; I left it at home".
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".
"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
Mallory: "The mill received a series of letters. Those letters are evidence. Now, we're not leaving here until I find out who wrote those letters. Alice, did you write them? Bob, did you?"
Carol: "I wrote them."
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.
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.
Can you point out a human language that isn't full of bastardized phrases? I'm pretty sure that's universal, including British English.
Edit: Also, Americans themselves have complained to me that British English is too fancy. And when I look at the sentences they are describing, it's just someone using an unremarkably intelligent and varied vocabulary. Meanwhile, educated American public figures speak like they are talking to children. Im not even talking about someone as verbally challenged as the current president. By their own admission, it seems that American English is a dumbed-down variant.
> `1.0` books (?) – Martin Ba Commented May 22, 2024 at 13:3
:)
It's just the way that people (via social mechanisms - mostly mimicry) standardized expressing the absence of something.
IOW, English is screwy
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.
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?
10 foot long pole.
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...
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.
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.
Then again, I could be wrong.
Languages are just what they settled down to be, until they change little by little every day.
> 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.
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.
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.
“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.
If you take singular as equal to 1 and plural as the opposite of singular it‘s obvious
1.5 books ενάμιση βιβλίο -- singular!
You are functionally saying something closer to "a book and a half" in english I guess! Actually this is an interesting duality in english: 1.5 books but a book and a half. Guess it depends on how "separate" linguistically the numbers are: is it one book and a half book or is it a single quantity? Greek for decimals between 1 and 2 picks the "two quantities" approach.
edit:
Math is very precise, and has very obvious correct and incorrect answers. Language much less so. So when we have a question like this, it FEELS like there should be an obvious and precise answer because we are talking about math, BUT we are using language to talk about math, so we are going back to an imprecise realm; which may feel confusing and wrong.
This is also the effect behind the engagement bait word problems and order of operations problems you see on social media.
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 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.
Ah, yes, I was thinking of in Europe, and as a number, but I failed to specify that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number#Types_of_nu...
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.
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.
So, my argument is that you are looking at the words and distinguishing the singular/plural aspect as driving why we say certain things. I'm saying that you can use a phoneme argument for why "there is a zero mark" sounds correct and meaningful, whereas "there is zero marking on this ruler" starts to stretch it.
That is, allow me to rephrase my assertion. Rather than saying there is an aesthetic argument, I'm asserting that the phonemes involved are a larger driver than is given credit. Often with grammar rules backfilled to solidify choices.
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’m not sure what you’re saying, that isn’t grammatically correct.
* 0 thing
* 0.5 thing
* -1.3 thing
* 1.99999 thing
* -2 things
* etc
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".
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...
"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.
It is not about the number 0.
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".
In addition, see the adj. definition of zero: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/zero_n?tl=true#1209971660
In this context "zero" is not a noun, but an adjective.
The sun is warm.
> 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.
"There are no spoons here." Correct in a situation where there could be zero, one or more spoons.
The information they communicate about the state of mind of the participants in the conversation is not the same.