Da Daten der Plural von Datum sind. Ich weiß, dass niemand außer den Beratern für Abschlussarbeiten davon weiß oder sich darum kümmert, aber meiner Meinung nach ist es so, wie es sein sollte.
Von _orbus_
Da Daten der Plural von Datum sind. Ich weiß, dass niemand außer den Beratern für Abschlussarbeiten davon weiß oder sich darum kümmert, aber meiner Meinung nach ist es so, wie es sein sollte.
Von _orbus_
10 Kommentare
I always think about this because my, yes, thesis advisor, was stickler for the correct usage.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/data
Data is now used as an uncount noun with a singular verb.
Data and datum are considered interchangeable by nearly all style guides. In fact data is now often preferred over datum because datum is almost never used anymore.
So basically the reason is that your usage is outmoded.
When discussing individual points of datum, data is plural. In a modern, computer-based context, however, „data“ cannot easily be separated into individual points and becomes a „mass noun,“ which gets conjugated in the singular. The Wikipedia article cited even mentions this
It’s a doggie-dog world out there.
In English (unlike Latin), data is a collective noun like family, or fleet, etc. It is fine to say „The family is on vacation“, just like it is correct to say that the data is beautiful.
This sub was originally meant for appreciating sentient androids, but was taken over by data science nerds.
If you want, you can create r/DatumAreBeautiful to bring balance to the Force.
Words can be both plural AND singular in English, and in this case you’re dealing a word that is both „a noun“ *and* „a mass noun“. While originally data *only* worked as the noun plural of datum, times and use change, and today data is *also* a mass noun. The concept of plurality doesn’t really apply to mass nouns, but they’re treated as singular for grammatical purposes. And of course, common usage changes over time too: data are no longer beautiful, that’s not now native speakers use it. In a living language, words change meaning over time, to the point where the original use can become not just archaic, but plain wrong. „data are beautiful“, in today’s English, is archaic.
And as such, ironically is a great way to tell who’s a native speaker vs ESL, because a native speaker doesn’t stop to think about „where a word came from“, to them „data is beautiful, obviously, that’s how that word works“. Whereas an ESL speaker generally has a way deeper knowledge of where words came from, and knows how those languages work, and so thinks of words in relation to their entire history, rather than how they’re actually used today =)
(and some word can change meaning *really* fast, so that you even can tell when someone learned English because certain words were only used in a certain way for maybe a decade or even shorter!)
Data are beautiful when presented in graphical form, typically in a single image.