Data is a plural of datum, if you're considering the individual pieces, but it's more commonly used (in my experience as a US native) as a collection singular like sand. Ex the sand has formed a hill, the data has filled the hard drive.
We are reading a lovely article about how "childer" is a plural, and children is some sort of troubling double plural. The word data is somewhat older and its use has had even more time to change. I wish the dictionary would lose the fight on data and we could all just say "the data is conclusive" and be happy about it. It sounds much more natural.
That's interesting. I've never encountered "datums" but a quick Google search turned up plenty of examples (like "Tidal Datums") and that "This plural is permissible only in the sense of 'fixed reference points'" [1].
dat- is the stem, I suppose, -um is a grammatical ending. Data simply suits the English ear better because it's close to the nominal suffix -er. How do you like this dater point?
In Germany we even stopped pretending that it's just a bunch of bricks and use the word as if it were the name of the game. We say "Let's play Lego". Does this sound strange in English?
Totally opaque to whether that's "lego's" or "legos" and children in general probably don't care for an overzealous syntactic classification of single morphemes either.
Is "gimme the lego over there" strange? I think it is, and if it is, then it's an interesting dater point to support this hypothesis.
