Example “0 crayons” as opposed to “0 crayon”
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Singular means 1. Zero is not 1. Why would singular be any more appropriate?
The number 1 is the only number that can be used for singular purposes. Every other number including 0 would be used for plural purposes. I think it’s like that because zero is essentially a no value number, so to use it like a single value number would be confusing.
not an answer, but compare “there are 0 crayons on the desk” with “there is no crayon (singular) on the desk”. so using plural is not, at least, specific to the absence of something, but must have something to do with the context of counting in general. whereas existence (a binary status) seems to lend itself easier to thinking of a singular object.
The languages of primitive tribes tend to have only three number words: one, two, and many. They understand other numbers, but they don’t have specific words for them because they don’t need to communicate larger numbers. They also don’t need, or have, the concept of zero.
Therefore, zero falls into the same category as many: the group of numbers for which there is no specific name in primitive languages. As a result, modern languages (which are of course based on primitive ones) treat zero the same way they do many. Both concepts only become important to refer to specifically when you need to count and record large numbers of things, and so both concepts got tacked on to existing languages.
It is about countable and uncountable nouns.
Non countable nouns cant be referred to with the word many. for example, you cant say, “there are many milk in the fridge” unless what you are referring to are milk *containers* which are countable. The milk isn’t countable so we say there is alot of milk, or there isn’t *much* milk.
when you have 0 or none of something, whether you pluralize or not depends on the countability of the noun. so there are no crayons, but there is also no milk.
It’s worth noting that other languages handle [grammatical number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number) differently. For example, in French zero is considered singular. So there’s not going to be a single universal reason.
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