data - a plural subject?

Would you like to see the natural rules of language in progress?





Do you want to see prescriptions in progress?

The examples I gave were not intended to illustrate that your comparison was a good one, Ebrown. It was not, even with the changes I made, eg. "exact phrase search".

But an exact phrase search, combined with such tools as, of course, English only pages and the use of certain regions does give a good raw indicator of the usage of certain collocations. It works much better, ie. more accurately, on opinion free collocations than it does on loaded opinion strings.

It is used by linguists and language researchers as, a good raw indicator.

There were a number of other questions that I posed that you have, mmmmmm, put aside for the moment. You seem like too honest a fella to simply ignore them completely.

We have to justify about data,If we remove the data authorized to use, I strongly doubt that we will find the same information as what is the data that end. It will follow the English law of nature. I'm sure you will agree that things will not meet the authority how to proceed in a natural fashion jeans.

JTT is absolutely right. "Data" in the way it is used in English is an uncountable noun, like information. No-one ever quantifies it (e.g. "one datum", "thirty data"), and it doesn't have a singular form when used in this sense. If it doesn't have a singular form, how can it be plural? There's nothing for it to be plural of. To argue that it must be used with a plural verb form because it is plural in Latin is as ridiculous as arguing that "agenda" and "ignoramus" are also plural nouns, because they are "plural" in Latin. (Note that "ignoramus" is a finite verb in Latin, "data" is a past participle, "agenda" is a gerundive. They are not nouns in Latin, nor are they used as nouns.) The Latin word "data" does have a singular form ("datum"), this is also used in English, but with a slightly different sense (a value against which other measurements are compared). When used in the plural, this should be "datums".