On Thursday, November 30, 2017 at 6:50:09 PM UTC-5, Matthew Schroeder wrote: > > Dear John, > > Thank you for your interest in resolving this problem. > > To answer your question I am referring to > http://www.sagemath.org/tour-quickstart.html. I was reading this to get > an idea of what SAGE can do, when I hit this road block :) > > "Sort of supports" my point? I tracked down a video of an interview with > a professor of Linguistics, within which she addresses this very issue. > During these dark times in America (and the world) > in which the expert is increasingly marginalized, I am surprised to see > Dr. Murphy's comments so readily dismissed here in an academic forum. > Please visit her home page <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/115259> at > the University > of Sussex. On her homepage you will see that Dr Murphy's areas of > expertise include "American English" and "British English". In watching > the video, I was struck by the rich and long history of this problem. > I was hoping that by presenting this information, others would have the > intellectual honesty to move past their individual preferences and just > consider the facts. Doing this seems the only way that mistakes like > "Maths" > will ever be corrected. >
I'm not sure if this is parody or not; I'll assume not. Suffice to say that despite the very sound linguistic analysis of the *origin* of "maths" (I wish the "pea(s)" example were better known), note her key argument in the original blog post: "there's absolutely no reason why maths should be considered to be more correct than math." That is NOT the same as "math should be considered more correct than maths"; I would suspect that most descriptive linguists (which is most academic linguists now?) would not go that far. Even the author says, "Myself, I do tend to say maths in BrE company, but only because it's so painful not to." (and she's American). I.e., in British English, apparently this has within a century become the nearly-universal accepted rendition. So the resolution is either 1) Do nothing because both are common practice in the standard version of American/received British dialects, and because it's not really that important given that SageMath users come from all over the world - even those who are native English speakers 2) Change "maths" to "math" in that isolated instance because the roots of SageMath are in American English vernacular, as evidenced by the fact this entire forum is in English, for consistency's sake > Anyway, what "quick start" are you talking about? The phrase "symbolic maths" does not appear anywhere in the Sage source code, nor does "numerical maths". John, he is referring to http://www.sagemath.org/tour-quickstart.html which is indeed not part of the Sage source code. See https://github.com/sagemath/website/commits/master/src/tour-quickstart.html for the source of this - apparently someone long, long ago wrote this in the original website. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
