A small issue, to be sure. But I’m puzzled that the common abbreviation for longitude should be “long”. Following the elegant 3-letter example of “lat”, surely “lon” is preferable: same number of letters, and the same invocation of the correct sound of the first syllable. “Long” seems decidedly awkward - too many letters, wrong sound - yet it’s much more common (though certainly not universal).
Anyone know why? I’ve heard it speculated that “long” is used because it involves chopping off the same letters as with “lat” - but surely what remains is more important than what’s discarded.
the “ng” in Longitude is a phoneme, so we can’t split the “n” from the “g” without it becoming in our minds a separate soundmeaning.
Or, more precisely, the “n” only takes the “ŋ” form (the part where you’re sort of swallowing your tongue right before the “g” in an “ng” sound) when it’s before a “g”, so if we chopped the “g” off we wouldn’t want to say “loŋ”, but rather “lon”, because we very rarely end a word with the pure “ŋ” sound rather than the “ŋg” (or of course, informally, “n”.)
Which is not to say there aren’t some abbreviations that do alter the sound of the abbreviated word, it’s just an explanation for why “long” seems more natural (to myself, at least.)
Some people, me, and programs do use Lat/Lon. I’ve also just looked through some of our programs and notes and the entire office uses Lat/Lon. This is the gonvernment so what do they know?
When I see the abbreviation “long.” it seems as if it should sound like the 4-letter word “long” - rhymes with gong, tong, etc. This does not match the sound at the beginning of the word “longitude”. Are you saying it sounds like “longe” to you, and therefore does match?
Whereas when I see “lon.” it seems as if it rhymes with con, don, non, etc. This matches the sound I hear at the beginning of “longitude”.
You are correct about that. Dictionaries split the syllables between the “n” and the “g.”
Here I think you’re off base. There’s a nice symmetry, logic, and consistency in using abbreviations that retain all of the “different” part of the full words. Not that that’s the only way to do it - if it were important to, say, keep everything at 3 letters, “lat” and “lon” would be the best choice. But I would venture that the brain more readily processes the elimination of “-itude” across the board than it would the combination of “-itude” and “-gitude,” making “lat” and “long” more readily recognizable.
We do? My understanding is that very few people actually pronounce a voiced velar consonant /g/ after the velar nasal /ŋ/ in words like “wrong”, “sing”, etc. Cite.
I pronounce the “Long” in “Longitude” as “Loŋj” (sorry, can’t find a copy-able IPA symbol for the “backwards o” or the “dz” sound, but it has the same “o” as “caught”.) I assume you mean you are pronouncing yours with the same “o” sound as in “cot”. Lahn-dzitude would just sound weird to me (assuming the other person spoke an American dialect.)
What messed me up when I was doing GIS programming is it is generally Lat/lon, but it is x,y for most customer systems. I finally put a sticky note on my monitor
“Lat is Y (N/S), LON is X (E/W)”
Well, there’s ignorance for you. Apparently I have been pronouncing “longitude” wrong all these years. I always said “long-i-tude”, with the first syllable like “long” and no “j” sound. Oops.
