If you think of the -s in mathematics, it’s like a “pseudo-plural”. It appears like a plural form, but really it isn’t because there is no singular mathematic; mathematics is an uncountable noun.
So since the grammatical status of the -s can appear unclear, it’s easy to see how it was thought worth keeping in British maths but not American math.
On the pronunciation of Z, Wikipedia has this to say:
In most English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Zambia, and Australia, the letter’s name is zed /zɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed X, Y, and Z from Greek, along with their names), but in American English its name is zee /ziː/, analogous to the names for B, C, D, etc., and deriving from a late 17th-century English dialectal form.
and continues like so (infix my own):
Another English dialectal form is izzard /ˈɪzərd/. This dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from Occitan izèda or the French ézed, whose reconstructed Latin form would be *idzēta, perhaps a Vulgar Latin form with a prosthetic [meaningless additive] vowel. Its variants are still used in Hong Kong English and Cantonese.
The “s” is just the contraction, English often makes abbreviations by taking the first (few) letter(s) and the last letter. Think about “Mr” or “Dr” or “cont’d”. “Maths” is just the same thing as those abbreviations.
“Math” on the other hand, is also an abbreviation, just not including the last letter of the word.
The vowels A /eɪ/, E /i:/, I /aɪ/, O /əʊ/, and U /ju:/ have names which match a pronunciation of the letter.
Then we have:
The /i:/ series: B, C, D, G, P, T, V, Z (a.e.)
The /eɪ/ pair J, K – notably adjacent in the alphabet
The /ɛ-/ series: F, L, M, N, S, X
After which we come to the outliers, which lie mostly in the second half of the alphabet:
H /eɪtʃ, heɪtʃ/ – perhaps because of the presence of H in CH Q /kju:/ – /kj/ is a rare pronunciation of the letter, eg. in queue; /kw/ is much more common R /ɑ:, ɑ:ɹ/ – likely no coincidence that this unusual form is possible for rhotic R W “double-u” – no need to dwell on this one Y /waɪ/ – the only “vowel” to be prefixed with a consonant, perhaps showing its semi-consonantal status. And, of, course, the /w-/ differentiates it from I. Z /zɛd/ – we just covered this
We usually call it how the diphthong ei or ij (apparently /ɛi̯/) is pronounced in Dutch. Since all of them are pronounced the same, we call ei “korte ei” (short y), ij “lange ij” (long y) and y “Griekse y” (Greek y). Although, i-grec is also used.
I’m not sure, I think the etymology is different. The Y is only used in loan words, while ij is also often found in words that use ei in German. The pronunciation is different in Dutch, closer to going from an e sound (as in “leg”) to a closed i sound (as in “meat”) than what German has, where its like going from a (as in “dark”) to a more open i sound (as in “give”).
I also don’t write the ligature of ij as I write the y, and I once noticed that I don’t write a ligature when the sounds are not a diphthong (which I found out from writing “bijection” differently from the Dutch word “bij”).
Apparently the etymology is that ij used to be written as ii, like many other double vowels we use in Dutch. There was also a time where people substituted ij with y, but it is commonly regarded as two letters.
Quite interesting is that both letters get capitalised when at the start of a word: we write IJsland, not Ijsland. This doesn’t happen with ei or other digraph sounds, e.g. Eindhoven only starts with one capital letter.
On a related note; when I was little and didn’t know much about Dutch pronounciation, but still saw Dutch words every now and then, I thought ij was pronounced as a long i. Because in Swiss German, we say fry ‘free’, Yysbäär ‘ice bear’, zyyt ‘time’ with a long, closed /i/-sound (the letter i is used for a slightly more open i). So when I saw Dutch words like vrij, I thought, “neat, they talk like us”. I was a bit disappointed when I learned that vrijbuiter is pronounced almost exactly like Freibeuter.
Now it’s just us and the Scandinavians who are resisting German Diphthongisation.
Flemish is just a Dutch dialect, they have the same spelling. In fact, the Flemish usually beat the Dutch in our largest spelling contest.
Frisian does use the y though, but as a closed i sound, not as a ij.
Except that German speakers find both of those diphthongs extremely difficult to pronounce, and generally don’t hear the difference between ai and ij, nor between eu and ui. There’s a difference in Dutch, though
My mother taught me to use fork+spoon when eating “capellini in brodo” (thin noodles in a soup). But that isn’t much frequent in Italy nowadays. I do that when my wife cooks far east dishes with noodles.
I’ve never seen an italian person eating spaghetti with a spoon, was him from north or south or islands.
We cut them for kids, but usually they learn how to properly roll spaghetti with a fork when they are about 5 or 6 yo.
(the joke only works in German and with French accent)
