Name: Is it Math or Maths? - Numberphile
Uploaded: 2015-07-04T06:00:26.000Z
Duration: 6 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

VI HART: Say you're me in your math class.

DR. LYNNE MURPHY: Emotions run high how about

If you're an American living in Britain, you will have been

corrected a lot and told things like, what's wrong with

Don't you realize that there's an S on the end of

mathematics, so you need an S on the end of math.

BRADY HARAN: You are an American living in Britain.

DR. LYNNE MURPHY: I am an American living in Britain.

BRADY HARAN: Tell me about how much problem this causes you.

DR. LYNNE MURPHY: Well, I mean, it's enough that I now

say maths, because I don't want to have an argument.

Well, it's only in the 19th century that people started

And at that point, the first known use of

There, you know, people are using it with a full stop-- or

And there's not a lot of evidence there that people

It looks like it started out as an abbreviation in writing

It's not until 1911 that we see maths with an S. And

They were probably just writing it in course catalogs

English people will say to me, there's an S on the end of

which I counter, but we don't put the last letter from other

abbreviations onto the end of those abbreviations.

So when you say fax instead of facsimile, you don't say

facsie, just because there's an E on the end of fax.

So that argument that you should put the last letter

onto an abbreviation, I don't quite understand.

Except that a lot of people say this because they believe

And so you have to use the S to mark the plural in

The problem with that is that mathematics isn't plural.

You don't say there are two mathematics that I

And when you make maths or mathematics agree with a verb,

So you don't say mathematics are interesting.

So there's plenty of linguistic evidence that

But people see the S and think, if there's an S on the

BRADY HARAN: Does that mean Americans have this deeper

understanding of what constitutes plural?

I think it's that-- and I don't think, necessarily, that

British people put the S on the end because they did think

It was the habit that was got into, probably because it was

And in written forms, you might abbreviate things all

But once they saw the S, they interpreted it as plural.

So this is what we call a folk etymology.

You see something with a form that looks familiar, and you

And so people are always looking for reasons why their

form of the languages is more logical than the other.

And the problem is that language on the vocabulary

BRADY HARAN: Which is ironic when you're discussing

So in English, we mark the number in a sentence in

The question comes, when you've got that S there, what

Is this S telling you that it's plural or not?

And the fact of the matter is, people say maths is fun.

In linguistics, when things are wrong, we put a star in

front of them, an asterisk, to signal that.