Gerry the gentle giraffe went to the gym with the generous gem of a gymnast Geoffrey (the giant ginger who wears gentlemen’s hair gel and studies geometry). Genius!
People are so weird about this. Yes, G’s often sound like J’s English is weird. The inventor gets to have the say, he called it “jif”, great, it’s “jif”. To say it hard g “gif” and act like all G’s sound the same is just announcing one’s own ignorance. Weird take. Welcome to English!
English is filled with weird duplicative shit. Ex: Why do we even have C’s anyway if we could use an S or a K? “Accident” one C is “kuh” and one C is “Suh”. WTF English?
The inventor can call it whatever he wants, but it’s not going to change the pronunciation that has stuck with the general public. Language isn’t some decided upon thing that one person gets to control, it is a tool that naturally evolves and changes over time as it spreads from person to person
What general public? I’ve heard it pronounced both ways often by many people. There is no agreed way to pronounce it. Even the dictionary recognizes both ways. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/GIF
so you agree then that one person doesn’t get to decide what the pronunciation is, and there is no “official” way to say it (although, the majority of people use the hard g - source)
Yeah but what the Brits eventually chose should go.
The only other option is to bomb the UK into oblivion and change the language’s name to American, and I’m a pacifist, so I’d rather just say it the correct way as the owners dictate without murdering them and declaring the language ours now.
He came out with that after almost 30 years of watching people fight over it. Yeah no, I've been saying [G]IF since 1996 and it's not changing now. He can shove his JIF where the sun doesn't shine.
I don't recall ever hearing what the actual pronunciation was until ten years ago. Was there a whitepaper or anything? The name spread by word of mouth. He should have done a better job of making sure it was being called what he wanted to call it. It's like trademarks. You don't use it, you lose it. For fucks sake he's been sitting in the shadows since 1987 just chilling and then busts out with the "official" one in 2013.
Sir or madam or otherwise, that is not how words work.
I once saw a garden center with the french word “soleil” (pronounced “so-lay”) in the name, everyone in the area pronounced it “so-leel”, but just because the French don’t kick down the doors and correct people doesn’t make “so-leel” any less incorrect. There is a correct and an incorrect way to say words, frequency of usage is irrelevant.
People from Nevada would like to have a word with you.
Also, no. Frequency of usage is the only thing relevant. That’s how language was formed. It wasn’t something one guy decided, it was something everyone adopted.
Look friend, be wrong if you want. That’s your prerogative.
The french didn’t create the word “soleel”, the founder of the garden center didn’t name his business “soleel”, the word “soleel” does not exist. Everyone who uses the word “soleel” is wrong. Usage is irrelevant, the creator gets to decide. Period. It’s jif. Be wrong or be right, your call. Just own your decision.
I learned a new word today that I think can help here by way of a story. “Ooftish” is the word, it’s a Yiddish word that translates in English to money. And I don’t know a lot of Yiddish words, but I’ve been getting into etymology so I read more about it. The word comes from a phrase that means “money on the table”, and the phrase was pronounced roughly “gelt af tish” (from one snapshot in time, anyway, according to wordsmith.org, this isn’t meant to be an absolute) where gelt is the word for money and tish is the word for table.
That made me wonder, how did this word “ooftish” come to be, because there was a word in the ancestor phrase that literally meant money already. One idea: someone that maybe didn’t speak the language but had been exposed to it heard someone say “gelt af tish,” understood enough context to know money was being spoken about, and took the part of the phrase they remembered and started using it to refer to money. And then it caught on. That doesn’t have to be true to make my point, because the next part is really the important part of the thought experiment.
Imagine this person starts using this word “ooftish” and it catches on as an inside joke among friends. They teach their kids, it spreads, more people are now using the word. It’s still a local thing, but it’s catching on. Another couple generations, and it’s become the defacto in-group way for a population to refer to money. But they’re all talking about a prepositional phrase referring to some unnamed thing that is situated on a table, and they’ve all long-forgotten the birth of the phrase and never use the word “gelt” at all anymore. Let me ask you: Is that entire population wrong today for using the word “ooftish” even though it is a linguistic travesty in this hypothetical world? Or does it make sense for them to keep using the word, because they all know what they mean when they use it and it would actually be more complicated to try and backfill this word with the more linguistically pure word that was used before?
You can’t use logic like “everyone else is wrong but me” about language, as satisfying as it would be sometimes to do so. We use language to communicate, and if we’re trying to get a message across, we communicate in the way that best accomplishes the need at hand - sharing an idea with others. That means the way words are used by a population is more important than grandstanding over how anyone thinks particular words should be used.
I formally invent my synonym to GIF. It’s GIF and pronounce it GIF, not JIF. Now everyone who pronounce it GIF are correct even by your logic. I also formally invent a figure of speech that goes by “It’s JIF” and means “I’m wrong” which means even you admit that you are wrong, and you cannot say otherwise because I’m the inventor, not you.
No, I’m giving an example of why the inventor of a word doesn’t have the final say in what the meaning or pronunciation of said word is. Either my statements above about my newly invented synonym are wrong, or you are.
That's kind of how language works. If everybody in the local area understand each other perfectly fine, then it has served its purpose.
Theres' a town in my region called "Purcellville", and everybody not from the area including Google will pronounce it as "PurCELL-ville" as spelled out, but every single resident within the town will insist its "Perc-UH-ville". Which is the "wrong" pronunciation. But the people in that town literally don't give AF.
Whether the people give af or not is irrelevant. If the founder(s) of the town intended it to be pronounced Purcellville, the people are wrong. If the founder(s) said percuhville, then they’re not wrong.
The founders are long dead and nobody alive has ever heard them say the name. That's how language changes from one into another over time. That's how we got all the thousands of unique languages on Earth.
First, it's an accent. Then over time, it becomes heavier and heavier until it eventually becomes a brand new language. Words may even be borrowed and used from other languages and changed as well.
The tag line provided by the creator when the format was created back in 1987 was “choosey image users choose gif” Clearly a parody of a similar tag line from Jif peanut butter.
It’s well documented going all the way back to 1987 when the format was first coined that it was always a soft g. Compuserve had it in their official memos. An early gif had the pronunciation embedded as a comment in its code. Witnesses attested that the creator would go around the office saying, “Choosy developers use gif,” a play on “Choosy moms choose Jiff.”
No he didn’t. They literally sold it as “choosy developers choose gif”. It was part of the marketing to software devs. He didn’t feel the need to say anything on fucking stage until normies started using it and couldn’t understand context.
Letters are pronounced differently in acronyms than in the original words all the time. Take POTUS, for example; the O and U are not the sounds in “of” or “United”.
I’ve had similar arguments with people over the pronunciation of Linux, with one person saying it’s “Lie-nicks” because it’s named after “Linus”, but Linus himself has said he pronounces his own name differently depending on the language he’s speaking at the time, but Linux is always pronounced “Lynn-icks.”
At this point GIFs in their original form as .GIF files barely exist anymore. GIF basically just means “short clip”. Why would the author get any say at all at that point?
Just a few examples that come to mind. Additionally, the pronunciation of the individual words included in an acronym DOES NOT determine the pronunciation of that acronym. See SCUBA as an example.
Do you have any examples of words changed by adding a consonant? Additional vowels in words, such as your examples, usually change how a word is pronounced
Also, your attack in the second paragraph is unneeded and contributes nothing to the debate. If an argument cannot be based on logic alone, I ask that you do not make it.
I acknowledge that you fulfilled my request but personally remain unconvinced using those examples. Tom is generally a nickname for Thomas and borrows pronunciation from that.
However I did remember the words kin and kind but there’s also tin and tint. So I’m just going to declare English overall as highly inconsistent and silly, will still pronounce gif with a hard g, but recognize that you have a different point of view. 🙂
Just because somebody who made a word wants to pronounce it a certain way doesn’t mean that’s others will pronounce it.
Heck, look at the at history of the word tomato. Came from the native Nahuatl word tomatl, which was changed to tomate for Spanish and then tomato for English. The British are closer to both the native Nahuatl and Spanish pronunciations of the word but few Americans will say it as “tuh-maa-tow”.
I mean that’s literally how it works. You pronounced the peanut butter with a soft J. You probably pronounce Lyft as Lift and JoS A Bank as Joseph A Bank. What a company chooses to name its product (gif was a product trying to be sold to software devs) they can choose however they want it to be pronounced. If you stop thinking of gif as a normal word and more as a product that was and continues to be sold then it makes a lot more sense why they literally gave it a catchphrase; “choosy developers choose gif”
And the person we’re responding here to also uses an example of language that evolved to what it is over a 300 year period FROM changes that happened between language barriers - Central American natives to Spanish to English (of which there are 2 variations).
The hard G or soft are pronounceable by the majority of the world. It’s not really a language barrier or change - it’s just inability to admit that maybe they were wrong in how they read it in their head and make the verbal change when evidence is provided.
With that said, they can continue to pronounce it with a hard g but it’s just being obstinate at this point.
Counterpoint:
You had to replace the g with a j in writing, otherwise people would automatically pronounce it gif like gift.
That alone is proof that “jif” is artificial and wrong.
Graphics Interchange Format. Not Jraphics. Unless you spell it out as Jee-Ai-Eff
Also, git isn’t spelled “jit”, it’s not “jit gud”, nor “jit hub”. Other examples that would be wrong: jirl, jirth, jiddy, jirder, jingko
Most of the ‘ji’ sounding words are rooted from other languages, mostly French (some of them brought over from Latin). Finally, languages where ‘ge’ and ‘gi’ sound like ‘je’ and ‘ji’ say ‘Gif’
By that logic, “scuba” should be pronounced scuh-ba, and “laser” should be pronounced lah-seer.
Also “jee” is also how you say the letter “G”.
Gin, Germany, giraffe, gypsy, gib, giblet. Raising examples of words that start with hard and soft Gs is absolutely pointless when both exist and are equally valid.
Why are people arguing about how an acronym is pronounced in the English language anyways? Who gives a shit? When you point out a “rule” in English, there will always be exceptions, many exceptions, to that rule. Even English doesn’t even agree with English: “entree” means appetizer in Europe but main course in the US.
Because it’s always fun to poke fun at how chaotic, anarchic and directionless the english language is. Besides, some of its rules feel more like suggestions
