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TIL When you hover over a piece of the phonetic notation on (English) Wikipedia, it shows you an example for its pronunciation
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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something in the back of your mind should tell you you're making stupid arguments when you start comparing persons with fucking file formats.
but since you're having a tough time with it, here you go: one deserves respect, the others don't. same with pronouns; I'll respect people if they tell me to use he, she or it, but if someone tells me this file format they came up with is a "she" I might slap them a little bit.
moreover things that see daily use will enter lexicon, so yeah proper name or not, it's part of language. look up genericized trademarks.
and finally, I already addressed this but you conveniently ignored my point in intuitive naming and started naming things in a stupider way than they're actually named to make your point sound more sensible rather than the actual case here in which the intended pronunciation is stupider and less intuitive than its spelling suggests.
if you want people to call your phone an iPhone, it helps if you spell it i-p-h-o-n-e and not a-y-v-ö-n. if it makes sense people will go along with it, if not, no one will give a shit what you want it to be called.
What a g-enius response from the g-entleman who thinks a proper noun refers only to names jiven to people, but not places, things, or ideas. I'm happy you wont incorrectly assign g-ender to a G-erman (or anyone else), but I fail to see how pronouns and proper nouns deserve different levels of respect.
Do you mean g-enericized trademarks like Joogle, or things like asprin, thermos, coke, or linoleum? All of which are pronounced the same as they were pronounced when they were only used as trademarks? "Entering the lexicon" doesn't change a pronunciation. People who can't or won't pronounce a word change pronunciations.
So every word used in the English language is intuitively named and pronounced how it's spelled?
The point I'm getting from you is that you don't like the way a name is spelled / pronounced, so you say it the way you think it should be pronounced, which is what I've decided to do with all words that begin with G in this comment. According to you, that is valid and I have pronounced everything correctly because "no one has any control over how words are said". So why bother wiht slpelnig nd prenunseeashun @ oll iff teh mesij iz kleer?
You and everyone else are joing to pronounce what you want how you want, and I jet that. That's ok. But don't try and push it as the "correct" pronunciation when the correct pronunciation is defined by the person who named the file format. "gif" is, at best, an alternate pronunciation of an already established word.
Despite our disagreement, I sincerely hope you have a good day.
the words you use as an example are irrelevant and look nothing like gif. see if you had thought about it a little you'd figure that people pronounce things based on the type of the word and syllable. German, gender etc are two syllable words. people say gif with a hard G because it's similar to words like give, get, gill, etc. now your argument, had it been good, would've instead involved words like gin and gib. they're less common but at least similar in structure. but there's my argument, it's more intuitive to read it similarly to give and get rather than gin and gib.
and the argument you give about intuitiveness are wrong on several fronts.
first of all, listing a bunch of words doesn't prove anything as every rule can have exceptions. just because some words aren't intuitive doesn't mean people won't gravitate towards reading intuitively. doesn't even make sense.
second of all, some of the words don't even fit the "unintuitive" description. colonel, sure, it's a stupid word with a stupid history. but knight? you know intuitiveness doesn't mean "read as written", it means it makes sense within the rules and exceptions of a language, for example i would easily know the k in knight is silent because I've seen tons of other words that have the same silent letter. know, knife, knock, knack... I guarantee that someone who is not familiar with one of the less common words that start the same way, say knave for example, would intuitively know how it's pronounced, and wouldn't really try to sound it out as "kuh-nave". same with phlegm.
third of all, these are not new words. my argument about coining a new word and expecting it to be read a certain way would place the onus on you to make it look like that's how it's read.
finally, because these are old words, some of them actually undercut your argument because the nonstandard pronunciation is the convenient one. knight lost the k later, when people found it more convenient that way. woden's day is now called "wensday"3 now because people find that more convenient not because Odin himself came down to Midgard to tell people this is how you're supposed to say the name... if even God names don't survive the convenience of the majority spekers, some fucking file format doesn't have a chance.
good day.
Well then why the can't GIF be GIF? Especially if the stated rule is the exception?
and germ, gene, gel, gist, gem, gym... Anyway, see your above quote.
Some rules are stupid and unintuitive. Sure it's not "read as written". But ask someone who is not familiar with and has never seen the word knave how to spell it. Adding a K would not be intuitive. Regardless, see your above quote.
Yes, old words have had plenty of time for the original pronunciations and spellings to be forgotten and warped between cultures and generations. We cant ask the creators of most words how they were pronounced and those creators (if indeed a given word can be tracked to one creator, as can GIF), who are long dead, no longer give a shit and it's unlikely that those changes were made in their lifetime. Do we know how they were pronounced in the past thanks to recorded history? Sure. Language changes over long periods of time. Like the climate, lots of small changing weather patterns over very long time periods creates a climate. People don't just wake up one day and collectively say "fuck this word in particular" only to have everyone who speaks that language just change their ways. It happens over very long periods of time. GIF has hardly had any time for the original pronunciation lost to the ages. In fact, the guy who made it up only died 3 years ago, and he specifically told you how to say it. You then learned of this, and decided you knew better because it's spelled funny for how it's pronounced and then forgot:
My chief complaint here is that when someone tells you how a word they have invented is pronounced, and you pronounce it differently on purpose, even if somehow your pronunciation was not objectively wrong, it's still incredibly disrespectful to the person who created it.
And so, GIF is pronounced "jif", even if that makes it an "exception".