- Geography
- Geology
- Giraffe
- Generous
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.
Good and very informative, thank you.
I’m still gonna pronounce it (G)IF though.
This, and Gig Git Girl Gibbon Gift Gill Giddy Gigahertz Gimmick Gizzard
As long as you don’t shame others with reasons that don’t make sense, you can pronounce it gif for all I care
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iafa959JvY - Literally this but with any example either way depending on what side you’re on.
It’s GIF. Just because you create something doesn’t mean you aren’t fucking dumb. Eventually, it’s no longer yours anyway lol.
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https://piped.video/watch?v=9iafa959JvY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Counterpoint: Gift
Literally has gif in it and is pronounced with a hard ‘g’.
We don’t pronounced words by what other words they contain. “Americano” is not “American+o.” “Fare” is not “far+e.”
For some reason, the hard G advocates for “gif” seem to make up fake language rules to justify pronouncing it wrong.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.
Tom and tomb
And I agree, I’ll remove 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. 🙂
Tom is a name for a male animal.
“Bot” and “both” may be more your style. Or, to stick with g, “gin” has a soft g while “gink” has a hard g.
LOL, arguing about English pronunciation based on spelling? Really?
Friend this is the internet, if you’re seriously expecting 0 trash-talk with your discussions then you’re in the wrong place.
Counter counter point. The inventor of the gif said it’s pronounced like the peanut butter. It’s already been settled.
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”
JPEG is the best direct example. Who pronounces the F sound?
For your SCUBA example, is it the U you’re talking about?
Underwater vs oonderwater?
Scuhba vs Scooba?
Scuhba has me laughing.
Also, the A stands for Apparatus, so it should be scuhbah since it’s Apparatus, not uhpparatus
Yep the U. Scubba dubba doo!
OBJECTION!!
First and foremost, pronounced Gif there
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.
So why do you care so much?
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Obviously it’s pronounced the same as the the “g” in “gigantic”
I pronounce it like the “g” in “design”
I never realized how contradictory this word is. Thank you
The life of the wife was ended by the knife in that GIF!
I just love Jraphical Image Format.
Oh I’m definitely pronouncing it zhif from now on!
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard people pronounce gigantic both ways though lol.
Guy-gantick makes me thing of an Englishman.
Jai-gantick makes me think American.
Nobody has ever once said guygantic. Not ever.
(There are 2 Gs in the word “gigantic”)
Even better Jai!
JaiJantick.
GuyGanTick.
GuyJanTick
JaiGanTick.
I used to be adament about gif with a hard G until I had a coworker insist that
sudowas pronouncedsoodoorather thanpseudo. like yeah, I know it stands for sUpEr uSeR dO but you can never get me to not say it the other way.I’ve been using Linux for like 18 years and I will never say soodoo. I will die on this hill.
In my head I thought of it like a psuedo su and thought sudo was clever, then learning it is like soodoo and I’m highly disappointed. I still say it like psuedo in my head. I use arch btw.
it’s not like gif stands for jraphics interchange format.
neither does it stand for giraffe interchange format.
nor does it stand for geranium interchnage format.
but if you’re sharing gifs of giraffes or giraniums, i suppose that’s allowable.
The p in jpeg stands for photographic, but you don’t pronounce it a “jay-feg”.
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!
That’s the gist, generally. Then, gyrating, giblets jiggling , he mixed a gigantic gin and ginseng.
It is gif
Amen 🙏
The creator of the format says “JIF”, so I say it as well.
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.
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.
“I’ve invented a thing! I call it a cup!”
You: “wow I love chup, everyone come look at this cool chup”
Doubling down on being wrong just makes you double wrong.
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.
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.
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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” 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.
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.
You are incorrect.
It’s jif.
When he invented it he named it after the penutbutter.
The slogan was “choosy developers choose gif” to parody “choosy moms choose jiff”.
Is there anything, at all, that I can do, to convince you, that you sound, like an idiot?
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But clearly he’s an idiot.
I use the same metric and use the English pronunciation of words as an American.l, because they’re correct and we are wrong.
I’m considered a hipster douche for it.
They are correct to say so.
Al-uuuuu-min-eee-umm
Yaw-gert
Tuh-mot-o
Is he a linguist tho?
gust jet over it.
Juys gust jet over it
The creator of the format, Steve Wihite, says it’s pronounced as JIF, but personally I still say GIF out of habit.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/22/tech/web/pronounce-gif/index.html
It’s like hearing people who work at Asus call it Asus instead of Asus.
The only reason they’re saying it’s Asus is because they have to. They say Asus like everyone else at home.
Also, after a certain amount of time, the word you made up is no longer yours. That be how language works yo.
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?
Why isn’t this higher up? Thanks for the real info, I was going to post this if no one else did.
I hate the way it’s pronounced. It should be like Line-ix, but the creator of it decides so as ugly as it is to say it’s lih-nucks.
Well, you see, the g in gif stands for “graphics” which is ultimately from Greek “γραφικός,” and because this is the 21st century, γ in front of a close front vowel is pronounced as neither /g/ nor /d͡ʒ/ but rather /ʝ/, which is pronounced a bit like English’s y, so in its purest rendition gif is really pronounced “yiff”, which doubles as homage to the online communities that OP frequents.
If you’re supposed to pronounce it based on the original word instead of how the person who invented it says it, then I’d like to see giff crusaders take on everyone’s terrible pronunciation of words like SCUBA (the U stands for underwater, so should be UH not EW) and NASA (the first A stands for aeronautics so should be pronounced Nair-sa).
Don’t worry, I was being 100% facetious! After all, γ is generally believed to have been a hard /g/ in Ancient Greek, which is the version of Greek that “graphic” is based on and is CLEARLY the wrong way to say gif :D
Kinda sorta un-jerking (but not really) for a moment, I don’t think that I’d include the rhotic in your hypothetical pronunciation in NASA and thus would say /neɪ.sə/ over /neɚ.sə/. I also don’t palatalize the U in SCUBA (/sku:.bə/, not /sk^(j)u:bə/), but I suspect that’s just a dialectical difference.
Edit: I just saw your NZ lemmy instance name and now I understand the vowel choices. Cheers!
I would definitely pronounce it NÆSA and see how long I can go before someone brings it up
Who fucking cares
Nonono, you don’t understand, flame wars build character! 'Twere the early aughts that made me the healthy and well adjusted person I am today!
Or at least, that’s what I’d say if what actually happened wasn’t that I became a jaded bastard and if I didn’t think it was just some ploy to drive engagement to let OP feel powerful for a moment…
Gaded bastard
Gesus Christ
Blame english instead of people probouncing the wrong way. English don’t give a fucking clue about pronounciation only using letters.
So I can pronounce Blamei as Lemmy. [B silent, a - e sound, mm and m can be pronounced same, and ei can be read as y]
Looks like the Jif crowds downvote bombing, yikes.
So I’m upvoting everyone, let’s try and keep this civil and downvotes out of this! Both sides are technically correct, correcting each other is divisive and playing into trolling.
Honestly who cares at the end of the day, even if one is technically correct enough people pronounce it the “wrong” way that it’s like trying to unpop a baloon
lol no they aren’t both correct. The creator of the format decides and did decide, it’s pronounced like a J just like the peanut butter they did a collaboration with because it’s pronounced just like that. There’s no debate, just trolling.
just because someone demonstrated intelligence and efficacy in a specific field does not make them an appropriate authority on other shit.
herman cain, for instance, was a very talented neurosurgeon but still such a fucking moron he literally got his own stupid ass killed through covid denialism.
this is also why we should still call it twitter no mattter what a dipshit like elon musk wants
people who have, on paper, a “right” to assign the name or title to something can be wrong, and this is one such case.
If you say so, Cathy. That’s your new name by the way, your parents were clearly wrong because reasons, and Cathy is easier to write so that’s you now.
Ironically more fitting than my legal name :p
Almost every person who was assigned the same legal name by their parents, I ended up hating their guts, but I’ve never met a Cathy I didn’t like.
If there becomes an etymological precedent, such as someone actually accurately guessing WHY Cathy would serve greater utility as my name than my legally assigned-at-birth one, I’ll introduce myself to people even outside this thread as Cathy, and furthermore explain why if they actually want to hear it.
As for this comment thread, hi y’all my name is Cathy. At least, to this person it is. I’ll recognize when they call me Cathy, though.
Good, the blood of Eden shall rise
I switch up my pronunciation on a whim to cause maximum chaos.
