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> This may be a little easier to grasp if you look at language. In many languages (most? nearly all?), you generally don't express lacking food as saying "I have 0 food" but as saying "I do not have food"--the concept of nothing is essentially reflected as turning the verb (or clause/sentence as a whole) into a negative mood, rather than indicating that the count of an object is 0.

It is equally common to say: "I have no food" or "I have nothing". I can go on: "I have no money". "I have no cattle".

So I don't know that your argument is a compelling one.

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No is a boolean operator, not a number. "Do you have any bread?" ... "No. I have no bread." It's the opposite of yes, or some. No or none isn't countable, it's the opposite of any positive quantity, that's why the concept of zero was so counter-intuitive.

It's far more common to say "I haven't got any bread". There's no word or phase in there that's proxying for a number.

I agree that "no" is not equivalent to "zero".

Your example ("No. I have no bread"), however, uses "no" in two different ways. The first is negation and the second represent the null/empty set ("no bread"). And the empty set is not the same as zero.