0 elephants
1 elephant
2 elephants
100 elephants
I understand the “s” for quantities larger than 1 because it’s plural (more than 1) — but why for 0, which is less than 1? Why does it just “feel more comfortable” (including for me)? Is there a logical reason behind it?
In: 5848
Linguist here—sometimes we count things like “1 rabbit, 5 rabbits”, but sometimes things are too hard or actually impossible to count, like rice or water. (Technically you can count grains of rice, but it’s not very practical for everyday use!). Since we can’t count some things, we have a special system for those types of things. We can’t count it, but we *can* tell if the entire bag of rice is mostly full, half gone, or totally empty. We can talk about “amounts”, even if it’s not a exact amount.
With non-countable things, we use words like some, none, most, or all. These words often have the word “of” after them, but its not always there.
“Most of the rice is cooked”.
“None of the water is safe to drink”.
“There is no wine to drink, but there is some honey.”
If you think about countable things with the same logic, zero of whatever thing means there is *nothing there to count*. Since there’s nothing there to count, there is no way to refer to it as one thing (singular) or more than one thing (plural). So what do we do?
Since “nothing” is uncountable, we treat it the same as any other thing we can’t count with numbers. The trick with things we usually count, though, is that we always have in mind the total amount of things there are for the situation we are talking about.
So let’s say I have 5 rabbits. That’s the entire amount of rabbits I have. Of the 5 rabbits, I can refer to some, most, all, or none of them. Those special amount words are always referring back to the total number that I have. So if I have 5 rabbits, and 2 are male, I can say “some of the rabbits are male”. If you think about it, I’m basically saying “Of the total amount of rabbits I own, some amount of the total number of them are male”. But that’s way too complicated, and we don’t actually talk like that.
“I have 5 rabbits. They exist, and I’m telling you how many rabbits there are. Sometimes, 1 rabbit comes into the kitchen and demands food.” The rabbits are countable because they exist, and you can say how many there are for different situations.
“None of the rabbits are outside because we we keep them in the house.” Since the situation we are talking about is outside, this is true even if the rabbits do live here. If you go outside and look, you will not see any rabbits. There are no rabbits to count, so we talk about them as if they are not countable. There are no rabbits outside. In other words, of the total number of rabbits I have, none of them are outside.
Turn it around. It’s not that we use the plural form for everything except one, it’s that we only use the singular for one.
Compare it to Japanese which doesn’t have a singular form – they would say one elephants, five elephants, one hundred elephants.
Because you are counting how many *entities* are in your set/group. Entities are always considered plural when counting.
Value “one” (1) is a special exception, the only exception indeed. Better question could be “why we do not use s for everything while counting?” and the answer will be something like “because one (1) is the measurement unit of set/groups and a single unit is indeed singular, multiple units will be plural” (also, the word itself ‘unit’ follow that rule as well)
I just read the word elephant too many times and now it feels like a made up word, despite the fact that I know it is real. That ever happen to you?
Because zero *isn’t* one????
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