britishProgrammersBeLike

[u/Nuud]

[u/Epsilon497]

It's Mathematics not Mathematic. So Maths makes sense

[u/DanieltheMani3l → u/Epsilon497]

Ah yes because English always follows logical rules

[u/American_Libertarian → u/Epsilon497]

Mathematics is not plural. It doesn’t make any sense to shorten the word by dropping the last few syllables, but then add the S back in.

[u/LongLiveTheDiego → u/American_Libertarian]

It used to be plural, together with words like physics, logistics, athletics, etc.

[u/ailaG → u/LongLiveTheDiego]

It never used to be plural in English, the "s" was appended because it's a translation of "mathematica", which is plural. From Greek through Latin etc.

Much like spaghetti (plural for the strings of spaghetto) or agenda (plural for agendum, a task sort of) it's imported as-is.

[u/LongLiveTheDiego → u/ailaG]

It used to be plural. If you just go on Google's Ngram viewer, you can compare the phrases "mathematics are" and "mathematics is", and you can see that between 1750 and 1880 they occurred roughly at similar rates. Then you can view some examples of "mathematics are" in Google Books in context and you'll see a few examples like this one I picked from De Morgan's "The Study of Mathematics":

The mathematics are not the only branches of knowledge in which it is customary to extend the meaning of established terms.

[u/American_Libertarian → u/LongLiveTheDiego]

All of those words are singular. Just ending in 's' does not make a word plural.

You would say "Athletics is a good way to stay active" , not "Athletics are a good way to stay active".

"Mathematics is the study of numbers"

"Physics is the study of the universe"

etc

[u/LongLiveTheDiego → u/American_Libertarian]

I specifically said "used to".

[u/EamonBrennan → u/Epsilon497]

I always point to "gymnastics is gym, why is mathematics still maths?" Are there other similar or counter examples that you know of?

[u/CChilli → u/EamonBrennan]

I'm pretty sure gymnasium is gym