I write academic papers in oceanography (marine biology, plankton ecology and evolution). Try a goggle search on Hans G. Dam.

The suffix in question would be -ology. I like the word affix which can be applied any word modifying addition.

And I think you nailed the issue on the head, with the suffix. Nouns ending in ich versus those ending in gy (is that a suffix?).

OK, here’s another thing that drives me crazy–which I see a lot among academics– using abbreviations like et al., e.g., and i.e., in speech. I see no point at all in using such abbreviations in speech. It’s just as easy to say and others, for example, and in other words, respectively. I guess I’ll get really incensed whern people start saying etc instead if et cetera. See, I must confess that I am really annoyed at the use of et al., particularly if applied in speech to a work of mine since my last name is Dam (“oh, that’s the article by Dam et al.”, ha, ha). Cheers

Maybe there is something about the suffix ‘-ic’ which makes us want to retain the plural marker. We don’t speak of biologies or chemistries but we do have linguistics,mathematics, physics, semantics, semiotics etc. I agree that these are probably best regarded as collective nouns e.g. mathematics is the umbrella term for arithmetic, geometry, algebra etc.

Do US speaks keep the ‘s’ if they use the longer form of math?