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Author: BlueIceTea

Oct 20th 2012 at 1:39:51 AM

I hope it's clear to everyone here that discussions of the "correct" way to shorten "mathematics" and other such topics are purely academic.  It's all very interesting to debate whether it makes more sense to say "math" or "maths", but the only thing relevant to the page itself is that one is standard in Britain and the other in the United States.  As long as that's understood, feel free to carry on.

I'd also like to observe that there seem to be ''some'' people here (or maybe just ''one'' person -_-; ) who think that everyone in the world speaks English the same way they do.  How it's possible to maintain such a belief, given the diversity of accents within the United Kingdom alone, is beyond me.  They must just live in a linguistic bubble and/or be extremely unobservant.  To those people I say: English does ''not'' sound the same everywhere in the world; sooner or later, you're just going to have to accept that.  If someone tells you that two words don't rhyme in his accent, you should probably believe him.  Why?  Because he ''probably knows a heck of a lot more about how he speaks English than you do''.

To everyone else I say: how about we ignore all silly and ignorant complaints from here on out?  All those in favour, show your support by posting about something that's actually helpful.

@tardigrade, thanks for the explanation about "wrath".  Perhaps because the word is so seldom used, I always thought it was "properly" pronounced "rahth" (rhymes with "bath" in R.P.).  Then I looked it up in the O.E.D., and it told me the word was actually pronounced "roth" (rhymes with "moth") or "rawth" (rhymes with "fourth").  English pronunciation: not confusing ''at all''.  :P