Seeking Grammar Police Ruling - Math's

[Steve]

---  "P. Alexis Nguyen" <alexisnguyen at ...> wrote:
>
> bboyminn:
> > Oddly, once again, my American Heritage dictionary shows
> >SNIP<
> > but no 'maths'. Though I suspect if I had an Oxford Dictionary
> > things would be different.

> Ali:
> 
> Merriam-Webster (online because I don't own English-English
> dictionaries) shows maths, saying that it's (1) chiefly British
> and (2) function is "noun plural," which is in keeping with 
> standard [US] English conventions.
> 
> ~Ali
>

bboyminn:

Well, we start out accepting that this is standard British 
usage. What I am looking for is the underlying reason for
this. Math is a truncated version of Mathematics, just as
typo is a truncated version of typographical, and info a
truncated version of information. I say truncated because
the sense of these words being abbreviated has been lost.

But, as I tried to point out, Mathematics is a collective
word. That is, it is a single word that speaks to multiple
things. In that sense, it is already plural. Which in turn
means that the truncated version of that is also already
plural.

Math, in and of itself, includes all subcategories of
mathematics. Math includes algebra, trigonometry, geometry,
calculus, and others. Because Math is an overriding 
all-encompassing category, there is no plural of it. 

>From another perspective, you can't have two Maths because
Math includes all forms of Math. There is no higher or 
parallel entity that would allow you to have two maths.

This is the underlying reasoning that makes 'maths' so
foreign to the American ear. There is no way for Math
to be more plural than it already is because, as I pointed
out, there is no way to have two of them. 

Expanding this, I could take two math classes, but I couldn't
take two maths because there is only one math. If I were
taking Trigonometry and Geometry, that is not two maths, 
that is two aspects of one math.

Still it is common and accepted in the UK, so I can't go
so far as to say it is wrong. Common and frequent usage
have, right or wrong, made it right. But to my mind and my
ear, it still defies logic.

Though, as much as I hate to admit it, Documents is a all-
encompassing category, and we frequently shorten it to 'docs'.
But, in a real sense documents can have parallel entities.
You really can have more than one document or more than one
type of document. So, in that sense, documents is more of
a generalization than a top of the list all-encompassing 
entity. I still say you can't have more than one Math. You
can have more than one sub-type, but you can't have more 
than one of the top-if-the-list entity. 

Just curious.

Steve/bboyminn