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by DonHopkins
70 days ago
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"Mathematics" is a mass noun that happens to look plural (ends in -s) but behaves singular: "Mathematics is hard" not "Mathematics are hard". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun >In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any part and quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Uncountable nouns are distinguished from count nouns. So "math" is the proper shortening of the mass noun "mathematics". What other mass nouns do you shorten by abbreviate by keeping the "s" ending? We do not say "phys" for physics or "econs" for economics, so keeping the "s" in "maths" breaks the rule. |
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