On Friday, December 1, 2017 at 6:43:05 AM UTC-8, kcrisman wrote: > > > > 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 >
(1) makes sense to me, or if we have to make a change, change it to "mathematics", as John Cremona said. > > 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.
