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Comment by allannienhuis | Hacker News Reader

I think Latitude historically comes first when spoken or written because of the rule of ablaut reduplication, which makes it more natural for the 'a' sound to come before the 'o' sound when using phrases like this. For instance, 'bish, bash, bosh' sound natural/correct, but 'bosh, bash, bish' sounds wrong.

I get the order wrong when working with geojson with embarrassing frequency...

http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/a-hotchpotch-of-redup...

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There's also the notion that determining the longitude is much harder than determining the latitude. Figuring out latitude is easy if you can measure angles to stars or the sun at noon and is something that people have been doing for quite long. Figuring out the longitude requires an accurate clock and was something that had a lot of strategic value in the seventeenth century. To the point where multiple kings and goverments at the time created rewards to incentivize scientists of the day to work on that problem.

More importantly, it needed to be accurate even when jumbled around in a storm crossing an ocean. Which ruled out for example pendulum like clocks.

We should rename them to langitude and lotitude. Much clearer!

I doubt this holds up in other languages though.

Cannot tell about all other languages, but it does hold up in Russian: широта (latitude) coming before долгота (longitude), 'i' before 'o'

How does a clock sound in other languages? In Swedish: tick tack

Tick tock.. But I’d argue it’s not the same thing. The ’tick’ sound comes first, it’s onomatopoetic.

Is it not just the way we prefer to order it in our heads?

French : tic tac

Indian: tick tick

Tamil (in India):

tik tik tik

Citation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik_Tik_Tik_(1981_film)

In every language I know the words are essentially the same...

In German, they are called Längengrad and Breitengrad.

I think we should just ask GPT-3 what is the correct order.

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