[goatlover]

Humans could do basic counting prior to the concept of zero. Obviously kids or anyone prior to zero would say there are no apples in the basket, but if you were to ask an ancient Greek philosopher if that meant "no apples" is something worthy of being denoted, they might think you're doing sophistry and trying to elevate nothing to something.

A smart ass kid might reply there are zero oranges in the basket, or zero miniature unicorns. Since the basket is empty, it could have potentially had anything if we're just going to imagine things in baskets. But we don't enumerate over all possible zero items in the basket. And anyway, the basket isn't really empty since it has N air molecules, N fibers or whatever.

The pedantic point I'm making is that counting at zero is a convention we developed for mathematical reasoning when appropriate, but not a starting place for counting things in everyday language.

[kazinator]

If an ancient Greek philosopher had three apples in his basket, and I took them away while he wasn't looking, oh, he would definitely find "no apples" something worthy of being denoted.