Talk:Depth sounding

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Suggest merge[edit]

Echo sounding and Sounding line both talk about this activity; once their redundant preambles are taken out, which is required to explain what "sounding" is, there's only a little in each article which could be advantageously moved here for coherence and context. --Wtshymanski (talk) 02:52, 3 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sounding line could perhaps be merged with Depth sounding, but I don't agree at all with merging Echo sounding into Depth sounding. Depth sounding is a much broader topic, with a history going back to the earliest of times. For most of that history, echo sounding has no importance because it didn't exist; it is just a recent technology which currently happens to be the dominant one. However, in other contexts, it is "Echo sounding" that is the important concept, and older methods of depth sounding are of no interest. For example, in Template:Hydroacoustics, the template needs the article on "Echo sounding", which has a prominent position in the "Sonar" section, whereas if it were merged, it would have to be relegated, and all but lost, as an "also ran" in the section on "Related topics". That would make the template unbalanced. There needs to be a standalone article dealing with contemporary depth sounding, and that article is Echo sounding.

Additionally, if you look at usage counts in Google Web, Books and Scholar, you will find that Echo sounding is consistently used three to four times more often than the term "depth sounding". That result also holds if you look at usage counts over the past year only, suggesting the usage is stable over time and there is no trend in one direction or the other. Last month, 655 users looked up "Depth sounding" and [4094 users looked up "Echo sounding", a 6 to 1 ratio in favour of echo sounding. In short, when people, whether scholars or laymen, think of depth sounding, they are usually thinking of contemporary echo sounding, and that is the article most users would want to see. --Epipelagic (talk) 04:22, 3 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Duly noted, and I've taken off the tag. --Wtshymanski (talk) 04:38, 3 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Phraseology[edit]

I don't think the use of archaic terms in limited to Mississippi riverboat men. I'm pretty sure these were terms used by most oceanic sailing vessels in the past, and were taken up by riverboat crews as traditional terms. Thus, the section on the Mississippi river boats usage of these terms is somewhat misleading..45Colt 19:40, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciation of lead[edit]

How is "lead" pronounced in "lead and line", at least by modern seamen? The etymology of both the element (/lɛd/) and the verb (/lid/) are interwoven, and nautical terms often have weird pronunciations, so this is not obvious. SamuelRiv (talk) 14:33, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

When I was in the Navy, in the early '70s, it was always pronounced as the verb, never as the metal. JDZeff (talk) 05:22, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]