>If I ask you to count the number of red balls in a bag with only 3 yellow balls, then the initial count in your head is 0,
Sorry, no. Humans count from 1. That's just a basic fact reflected in the history of numbers, which at early stages often didn't treat 0 as a number, but as a special case. And if you would say "I counted zero red balls" most people around will find it an unusual wording. Normal way of saying it doesn't involve mentioning 0 at all: "It's empty", "There are no red balls" etc.
That special casing in English of no/none/empty is as much an artifact of lost germanic grammar cases in English as it is anything "natural" or inherent to how English speakers count.
I'm a member of multilingual family, and I'm inclined to insist it's not about Germanic grammar cases, because it's true for non-Germanic languages as well.
I just went "nearest ancestor up the stack" as a short hand, because the evolution of languages is a huge tree and a lot to talk about. If we want to get into it deeper, Proto-Indo-European had some truly fascinating grammar cases from what we think we've reconstructed of them. Most of the stuff that PIE did seems like "natural laws" simply because of how many modern languages we regularly see branched from it and how deeply rooted a tree in the language forest it is. But then we also have had chances to study non-PIE rooted languages and the "universals" are fewer than we think they are.
Sorry, no. Humans count from 1. That's just a basic fact reflected in the history of numbers, which at early stages often didn't treat 0 as a number, but as a special case. And if you would say "I counted zero red balls" most people around will find it an unusual wording. Normal way of saying it doesn't involve mentioning 0 at all: "It's empty", "There are no red balls" etc.