Hmm, I think that would tickle. Let’s try a rapid series of interdental plosives, instead. Voiceless, if you please.
(Btw, I was taught bilabial, as opposed to bilingual, as well. Not to nitpick.)
That seems to be a common pattern with these Latin plurals. If the plural is used far more often than the singular (as with data and datum), but the plural appears not to have any plural morphology (as in, it doesn’t end in -s as native English plurals do), it makes sense for it to be reanalyzed as a singular mass noun. Which is probably the prevailing usage of data today - “the data is corrupt”, “an important piece of data”, &c are more common than the etymologically correct “the data are corrupt” and “an important datum”. The singular in particular seems almost unused. Media is a similar example, although in that case the plural and singular seem more to have developed into independent words (medium in reference to, for instance, a particular form of art, is alive and well, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it pluralized as mediums) while media is a mass noun referring to the press in general and occasionally is even pluralized again to medias (though that grates on many people’s ears, including mine.)
Most of these words are second declension neuter nouns in Latin, with the ending -UM in the nominative singular and -A in the nominative plural. Even in the Romance languages, a similar process reanalyzing the neuter plurals into singular mass nouns is fairly common. For instance, Latin OVUM, plural OVA essentially split into two separate words in some of the Romance languages; each of the words underwent the various phonetic processes that all Latin words underwent, and in modern Italian the results are uovo and uova. Uovo, because of its -o ending, has been reanalyzed as a masculine singular, and is the basic term for “egg”. Uova is also understood as a singular, but feminine because of its ending, and it means “roe” and functions as a mass noun (as do “roe” and “caviar” in English, of course.)