Sadly, treating "data" as a singular noun leaves the door open for a grammatical horror: datae.
This arises from treating the
neuter plural as a
feminine singular, with the following reasoning:
- data is singular.
- I want to talk about more than one of it.
- I know it's a Latin word.
- Latin words that end in "a" are made plural by changing the "a" to "ae"
- The plural of data is therefore datae
I have seen this in formal writing. I have wept.