If you were to indicate that a subject belongs to a specific field (say, physics), would you say "the subject on physics" or "the subject of physics"?
I found a similar question as to whether "the knowledge on" or "the knowledge of" is correct, and it turns out more native speaker point to "knowledge of" as the standard and correct usage.
Anyway, a search in Netspeak reveals that "subject of" has 7.7 million times of usage as opposed to "subject on" at 169 thousand times.
http://www.netspeak.org/#query=subject+%253F
Here's the result from Google.
But I still wonder if the word subject can be followed by "on" and then a specific field (physics), or if I should just always stick to the preposition "of".
I have this question in mind because I found this online news titled "Perkasa Wants Students To Learn This New Subject On The Malaysian Constitution"
http://says.com/my/news/perkasa-wants-asas-perlembagaan-to-be-taught-in-schools
Of course, I'm aware the news was not written by a native American.
I was educated to use "on" to indicate a noun belongs to a specific field.
Is this a wrong concept that has never been used by native speakers?
Best Answer
According to the Oxford Dictionary, on can mean
You can have a discussion on..., a thesis on..., a book on... etc., but it doesn't make sense to say "the subject on physics" because subject and topic are synonyms, so "the subject on physics" means "the topic having physics as a topic": it's a snake eating its own tail.
Physics is a type of subject, like Ford is a type of car: we can use of, which can have this meaning:
So, "the subject of physics" is fine.