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.

no book -> not a book

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")

"Un petit rien" => a small thing

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.

The cognitive origins of these must be interesting. Rooted in our understanding of existence?

I use Xero's books.

Zeno’s book keeps eluding me, I keep getting halfway closer to finishing it

Be careful. That could be a violation of the DMCA, unless you do that one chapter at a time.

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.

"There isn't a book on this subject"

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.

"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.

> English requires the use of an article with singular nouns, because the question of "which X" is important.

Well, that obviously can't be true, or other languages would have the same requirement.

I guess I should have made that say "important to English."

Languages definitely impose "models" for various things and those are certainly different amongst each language.

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.

American English is shifting strongly in the direction of always using "is" when the subject is dummy "there".

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]".

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.