719
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
719 points (99.2% liked)
Today I Learned
25056 readers
1185 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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".