Separated by a Common Language

As promised in the comments of my last post, this post pulls together and expands upon discussions that have come up more than once in comments on other posts and e-mails to me. Back in July, Ahab wrote:

I was castigated recently by a Brit for the nonsensical nature of saying math when the long form is mathematics, so any explanation you can provide on that front would certainly put my mind to rest.

Castigation is common on the math/maths issue, and the castigation is usually British to American. So, I'm going to castigate a bit in the other direction, because there's absolutely no reason why maths should be considered to be more correct than math.

The castigation usually goes: "Mathematics is plural, so maths needs its -s." It's a logic based on a false (AmE) premise/(BrE often) premiss. Just because there's an -s at the end of mathematics doesn't mean it's plural. The suffix -s is homonymous. Homonymy is when the same lexical forms (i.e. words or affixes) have unrelated meanings/functions. That is to say, it's when two words/affixes just happen to be pronounced/spelt the same. So, can is a homonym because either it can refer to a kind of container (can of Coke) or it can be a modal verb (I can go). Those two cans are completely unrelated. Similarly, there are several suffixes with different meanings/functions that all coincidentally have the form -s:

suffix	function	example
-s	plural	one cup > two cups
-s	present tense, 3rd sg verb agreement	I run > he runs
-s	adverbial marker	unaware (Adj) > unawares (Adv)
-s	noun marker	linguistic (Adj) > linguistics (N)

(I've left out the possessive suffix 's, because it has some complicated properties that aren't relevant here.)

How do we know that these are really different affixes, and not just the same affix doing a range of jobs? Partly we know from history. The plural -s comes from an Old English case suffix (-es or -as). The verb one has derived from the suffix -eth (or -ath) in earlier Englishes. The adverbial one is related to the possessive 's. And our friend the nominali{s/z}ing (=noun-making) suffix generally affixes to roots from classical Greek. (See comments for further discussion.)

These suffixes differ in their productivity -- that is, how regularly/predictably one finds them in contexts where they could, in principle, go. The first two are very productive--although there can be exceptions in which they are not used. That is, while -s is the most productive plural marker in English, it's not the only plural marker--we also have -(r)en in children and oxen and a zero (invisible) suffix on sheep and fish (one sheep, two sheep).

The last two in the table are not very productive at all, and the last one is the -s we find in mathematics. Because we have a very productive and common plural -s and a not so productive/common nominali{s/z}ing -s, people often mistake the less productive suffix for the more common suffix. This has raised such a debate in the field of folkloristics that no fewer than three articles in Journal of American Folklore have addressed the final -s in folkloristics. [See References, below.] In one, Bruce Jackson calls folkloristics a noun with 'no existence as a noun in the singular', but he's corrected by Dan Ben-Amos, who says that folkloristics is instead a singular noun with no existence in the plural. (Note that there is no *folkloristicses.)

How can we tell whether or not this -s is marking a plural in mathematics and folkloristics? We do so by seeing whether the words trigger plural behavio(u)r in other words in the sentence. A first test might be whether you can count mathematics (* means 'ungrammatical'):

*one mathematic	*two mathematics
*a mathematic	some mathematics

Mathematics doesn't work with numbers because it's not a countable noun, it's a mass noun. That is, it does not take plural marking because it is not the kind of thing one can or does count. Similar examples (without the confusing -s) on the end are cinnamon and boredom. Note that you don't talk of putting *cinnamons in your food (unless you're making the point that they are different types of cinnamon--which is a different matter), nor does one suffer *boredoms if the boredom happened at different times. Cinnamon and boredom are treated as masses with undistinguishable (or at least not-worth-distinguishing), and therefore uncountable, parts. If we want to make such words countable, we have to use another noun to do so: two teaspoons of cinnamon, three episodes of boredom. Similarly, you can have three theories of mathematics or three mathematics classes, but not *three mathematics.

The third person, singular present tense -s verb suffix (the second -s in the table above) provides another test of singularity. If the subject of a verb is singular, then the verb needs the -s (or the equivalent in an irregular verb like is or has), but if the subject is plural, it can't have the -s. So:

singular subject	plural subject
The idea pleases me.	The ideas please_ me.
Mathematics pleases me.	??Mathematics please_ me.

Now, some of you will say that Mathematics please me is what you'd say. This is the effect of the folk-belief that mathematics is plural; it has started to change how people use the word. We see the same kind of language-change due to misapprehension of the -s suffix in the short form maths. Math is the older form--the OED has examples back to 1847, but examples of maths only from 1911.

Another interesting point here is that you don't see the same kinds of abbreviations for other nouns with the nominali{s/z}ing -s. For example,when BrE or AmE speakers abbreviate linguistics, they tend to say ling. I've never heard anyone talk about the Lings Department.

Why is maths the exception here? It probably has something to do with the fact that it's a much more common word, especially since it refers to a school subject. Because it's more common, it's subject to more folk-reasoning about it and more spread of that folk-reasoning. It also requires more frequent abbreviation than less common (linguistics, folkloristics) and shorter (physics) similar words. So, someone along the line misunderstands it as plural, starts using the -s in the abbreviation, and perhaps making it agree with plural verbs, and it spreads. It carries on because the belief that -s on nouns is always a plural marker is a simpler belief to hold than that -s has different functions on different nouns.

Better Half has just run in from listening to A Prairie Home Companion, where he says that Garrison Keillor just said you do the maths. (The AmE expression is usually you do the math.) We met Keillor (if it counts as a 'meeting' to have a book signed and make a little chit-chat about being an American abroad) in Brighton a couple of years ago, and in many ways you could say he's not a typical AmE speaker (even though he certainly trades on his down-home midwesternism), since he's lived abroad at various points in his life. But do let me know if you're a Minnesotan who believes this is one of Keillor's actual down-homeisms.

Myself, I do tend to say maths in BrE company, but only because it's so painful not to. Can you imagine if I had to say all of the above every time I was unjustly castigated?

References
Ben-Amos, Dan. (1985) On the Final [s] in Folkloristics. The Journal of American Folklore, 98: 334-336

Hansen, Wm. F. (1987) A Note on the Final [s] in Folkloristics. The Journal of American Folklore, 100: 305-307.

Jackson, Bruce. (1985) Folkloristics. The Journal of American Folklore, 98: 95-101.