While commas do not necessarily correspond with pauses, I tend to hear this much more often the other direction, where people will pause in a place a comma would be nonstandard. When going the other direction, the commas usually disappear over time. Styles which require more commas seem older than ones that allow then to disappear along with speech.
Two Options:
“I had help from many people whom I wish to thank.”
“I had help from many people I wish to thank.”
Is this a joke? I thought data was a mass noun, like water.
Medium - media
Datum - data
It’s iruginally a plural count noun. It’s current status is ambiguous.
If I saw someone write ‘two data’ instead of ‘two pieces of data’, I’d assume they weren’t a native speaker… Don’t see how it can be ambiguous, whatever it meant originally.
How about, “ED50 and WGS84 are two [geodetic] data which differ by a few hundred meters in Europe” ?
No pieces involved.
Yes–from copora of current NA English (written, spoken, formal, informal, academic, fiction, etc.), the word data is construed as plural about 2/3 of the time, and singular about 1/3 of the time. The plural usage is concentrated in academic print, while the singular usage is concentrated in speech, as well as magazines and newspapers, (which at times are quotations of speech), though not exclusively.
Just as an example, here is a quote from Scientific American, May 3, 2017, in which data is construed as singular:
Sorry, that should be March 5, 2017.
That brings back some memories. I don’t recall if I ever saw ‘datum’ pluralised like that when I worked with those coordinate systems, and your sentence still sounds wrong to me, although I could imagine someone writing it. I’d prefer ‘datums’, which I’m sure grammarians would object to.
Are there examples like the one **DPRK **came up with, where ‘data’ is used with a number?
It apparently is plural, but not a true count noun, at least according to this source.
This reflects my experience. “Two data” sounds horribly ungrammatical to my ears. I do see there is a usage mentioned above, but it still awkward and un-English to me.
ETA: Furthermore, regarding “datums”:
I don’t have time to do a complete search, but just from a quick initial look, collocating with two, I can only find one (out of the first 100), from Military History magazine (2002, p. 10), (“An historical theory of intelligence”):
Everything else comes with counters, such as “two data points,” or “two data sets,” etc.
Actually, three. Another in *Shakespeare Quarterly *(2016), and another spoken on CNN in 2006. So three out of 100 with “two data.” It does happen, but the rarity is probably why it would sound strange, as pulykamell mentions.
That explains it, and the fact guizot could find very few examples seems to confirm what they say.
And that explains why ‘datums’ sounded better to me in that context. Must have remembered it subconsciously.
Heh. *It’s still awkward and un-English to me.