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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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OK but there are other similar words that start with gi like giraffe and gigolo, but really that's not why I or anyone I knew in the 90s started using the soft g to say "gif." We did so because we learned about the format, and said "Neat, what's it called?" and they said "it's called a gif" because that was the name of the format. We didn't debate the pronunciation because it had been given a name, the same way you don't ask a person you just met "Shouldn't 'Bob' be pronounced with a long 'o' like the very similar name 'Job'? I'm going to call you 'Bobe' because that makes more sense to me." You'd have to be a massive douche to say that out loud to a person who had just introduced themselves.
If someone said it with the hard "g" we just nodded and went about our day because it doesn't matter, we knew what they probably meant and they just hadn't read the manual.
Pronunciations change over time, and that's good. Language is a function of communication, and better communication is what enabled humans to transfer knowledge. If someone uses the soft g, you know the word they're saying, and I know you're probably not saying the word "gift" from context. We're communicating either way, and we don't have to pronounce every word the same.
Case in point, I don't say "emission" with a long "e" sound, I say "ehmission" because it doesn't matter that much.
The only way to be wrong is to claim that someone else is saying it wrong.
Yeah, and then we all assumed it was pronounced "gif" not "jif" because the only other word with the letters "gif" was "gift" and that had a hard g. Later on, someone claimed it was supposed to be pronounced "jif", but we all laughed at that idea and kept using the correct pronunciation.
Neither did we, it was a hard g. There was no debate. Sure, some people claimed it was supposed to be a soft g, but we all laughed at that idea because it was ridiculous.
I'm guessing you're not multilingual then, because I am, and it's extremely common to change how someone's name is pronounced. People with the name "David" who are French are used to the French pronunciation of their name being "Dah-veed" but in English "Day-vid". French people pronounce "Bob" as "Bub". It's good to allow people to slightly change how your name is pronounced because it flows better in their language. If they have to pause every time your name comes up to adapt how it's said, it just makes things more difficult.
As for "gif", if someone pronounced it as "jif", we giggled a bit, but that's it. It was only if someone was really insistent that it had to be a soft g that we really laughed. Some people tried to claim that the creator of the format had wanted a certain pronunciation, but we knew that didn't matter.
Exactly, and part of good communication is good pronunciation, because if you mispronounce things it makes it harder for people to understand you. If you insist on using a nonsensical pronunciation then you're just trying to make it hard to communicate with you.
That is the most anti-linguistic take ever lmao. There is no such thing as an objectively correct pronunciation, both pronunciations of "gif" are valid in the context of most English conversations.
On another note, the guy who created it said it's pronounced /dʒɪf/, so if any pronunciation is more "correct" it's the one you hate. It's not "some people tried to claim", that's what it actually is "correctly" pronounced like according to the only one that can come close to being considered an authority on what the correct pronunciation is.
Your comment being so pretentious and stuck-up about you not liking a pronunciation leads me to believe you're making the whole "we" thing up, and instead of a group of people being dumbasses and laughing at a correct pronunciation, it was just one person (you) malding about it in their head. Because being the kind of person to actually laugh at something like that in real life, face to face, would be too embarrassing for anyone to actually go through with it. God even just reading your comment makes me feel like I'm looking at made-up Reddit stories again...
Also how people speaking other languages handle names doesn't have anything to do with this, there's a big difference between calling someone "wrong" for pronouncing a loanword differently than in the parent language because of the languages' phonetics & phonotactics not aligning with each other, and insisting that everyone else is "wrong" because their completely linguistically valid, common pronunciation challenges your understanding of the language.
Oxford uses /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation with /gif/ as the secondary in most of their resources (although a lot don't specify a primary or secondary), Dictionary.com lists /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation, some like Merriam-Webster list both equally, Cambridge less consistent but list both. Clearly the people who's job is language disagree with you, even if you don't want to ask for linguists to tell you, they literally make the language references you use. If you want to be stubborn and insist on being wrong, so be it.
You can now continue malding about the fact that you use the incorrect pronunciation for the rest of your life, since apparently that's how you see language.
But, there are patterns to the language and using a soft "g" sound doesn't follow those patterns, so it's objectively a less correct pronunciation.
Who cares about that guy? He made a mistake, he should have looked up how words are pronounced before trying to get people to mispronounce "gif". If he'd said it was supposed to be pronounced "dug" people would have just ignored him, but his attempt wasn't that absurd, it was just slightly wrong, so not everyone ignored him the way they should have.
It really sounds like you didn't have friends. The rest of us did.
Of course it does. How you pronounce things depends on the language you use. How people pronounce the letters "gif" is based on their language. In English, it's a hard g.
Who makes these mystical "rules" that English surely follows? And who says the patterns you see are objectively more correct, there are a ton of other words with "g"/"gi" that pronounce it with a /dʒ/, you have to do some real mental gymnastics to justify one of them being more correct. There is a point where you have to paint a massively arbitrary line to which patterns are more "correct", it is a completely subjective matter.
He's the only one that can be considered an authority on how the word is pronounced LMAO.
Pronunciation isn't based on spelling, it's the other way around. Writing is a tool made to accomodate language, and said writing isn't a pronunciation guide. You're lobotomized if you think otherwise, especially in English. But regardless, see below.
But he didn't pronounce it like "dug". He pronounced it consistently with another common 3-letter word "gin". Is "gin" wrong now? You can cope with being wrong all you want, but it doesn't make you less wrong.
Yeah no that writing reads like a fake Reddit story, I refuse to believe even the dumbest teenagers would act like that.
The English writing system isn't the English language, and the English writing system isn't consistent enough to make estimations for a pronunciation like that. The only two words in the language that contain "gif" are "gift" and "fungiform", plus derivatives of course, the latter of which is generally, by standard, pronounced with a /dʒ/ sound. If you think that's enough basis to go off of to make rules for every other word containing "gif", and then insist that your pronunciation is "correct", that's a you problem.
The same goes for any language – German has mostly-consistent generalized spelling conventions for the language that approximate pronunciation, but a LOT of common words break this convention, including "guken", "orange", the ending "-ig", "toilette", "vase", etc. which are pronounced differently than their spelling would lead you to believe. In fact it is most common for Fremdwörter & Lehnwörter to not be spelled typically. Is every German speaker pronouncing those words wrong now? What about Italian languages, which often do the same thing but significantly more? You can look at less and less standardized languages that contain more and more irregularities, until you get to a language like English and see that the "irregularities" in the writing system completely outweigh any actual "regularities" you see and it becomes completely pointless to try to enforce a pronunciation based on a certain spelling. It's why people learning a language like English or Tibetan or even Danish will have often cite the spelling as an extreme pain point (I can corroborate the first based on my experience teaching ESL), it is an inconsistent orthography where the spelling is almost entirely dependent on the etymology or something else, rather than any current pronunciation.
It's also convenient how you left out the entire part about the dictionaries. Almost as if that was a silver bullet for your flawed argument and you can't acknowledge it because it would make you look too crazy. Because the people who are the most looked up on for "correct" language by most English speakers say you're wrong. Hmmm.
When you consider that a large number of words in English which are spelled the same have different pronunciations or are pronounced wildly phonemically differently by different speakers or in different dialects, like "minute", "combat", "perfect", "read", "bass", "close", "agape", "object", "sewer", "wind", "wound"... "apricot", "leisure", "often", "crayon", "either", "been", "caramel", "garage", "yogurt"... your argument about pronunciation based on "spelling rules" falls apart pretty quickly.
Present your argument on how English works to any linguists or even anyone who has basic knowledge of linguistics and you'll be laughed out of the room.
He's just the guy who invented the software and coined a name for it, he has no authority over how that should be pronounced. If he came up with a ridiculous pronunciation (as he did) he should be laughed at and people should use a sensible pronunciation.
Of course it is. That's how spelling works. In English it isn't nearly 1:1 like other languages, but spelling is very strongly tied to how a word is pronounced.
Yes, it is. That's why people pronounce it with a hard "g", because they've internalized the rules for spelling vs. pronunciation in English and know that those 3 letters in that order has a hard g.
There are slight differences in pronunciation, not wild differences. The differences are so slight that normally you can understand the word someone is using in another dialect without difficulty. And, in every English dialect "gift" has a hard g, as does "gif".
Yeah you see you've omitted most of my argument because it'd be absurd to argue against. Including the part which I bolded specifically – the part about e.g. Oxford or Merriam-Webster completely disagreeing with you.
I already mentioned, there are plenty of words with "gi" that say it /dʒ/, including things that end in "-giform" (e.g. "spongiform", "fungiform") which has "gif" in it. That on its own disproves your point. You'd have to do some real mental gymnastics to justify it, like "gift is shorter" or "only words that start with gif count", which is just grasping as straws making arbitrary lines. At that point I could just say "only 3 letter words count" or "gift doesn't count because the syllable isn't /gɪf/ but /gɪft/ with a consonant cluster, therefore it's invalid, only things where "gif" represent a standalone syllable count" or something else. Oh and by the way, some dialects like West Country pronounce gift like it were spelled "yift", because using a yod is the "original" pronunciation. Since your criteria seems to be if dialects pronounce it that way, that means I can go ahead and pronounce it like "yiff" and be correct in your eyes, no? Or, maybe, maybe, the "correct" pronunciation of a word is THE MANY WAYS WHICH GROUPS CAN BE OBSERVED PRONOUNCING IT rather than some arbitrary prescriptive "correct" way based on stupid and inconsistent arbitrarily made rules, and the idea of one being correct is completely subjectively defined and made up.
Also no, that's not "how spelling works", if it were then words like "gimbal" wouldn't have 2 or more pronunciations (/dʒ/ vs /ɡ/ like in "ɡif"). Spelling is not tied to how language is pronounced, in English it's roughly tied to how a few random Middle English to Early Modern English dialects spelled and pronounced it, which is extremely detached from how it's pronounced today – most words used to have over a dozen spellings based on the writer and we created standards based off of multiple arbitrarily picked writing styles. You can pick out a few inconsistencies, but as I said the irregularities vastly outweigh the regularities. This is especially apparent when you look at words that contain strings like "gh", "gi/ge/gy/ci/ce", "oo", actually anything at all with a vowel really.
And who are you to determine what a "slight" difference is? It's all subjective. Someone with a thick welsh accent, or a rural southern Irish dialect, or who speaks Scottish English, or who has a thick north Indian accent, will have a hard time being understood by the average person who speaks e.g. an accent from the west coast US or Chicago. You can find many clips online where English MPs/politicians have a considerably hard time understanding Scottish people because of the linguistic differences.
By your logic, British people pronounce "schedule" wrong because they generally pronounce it starting with /ʃ/ (although both pronunciations are found and used), while Americans pronounce it with /sk/. I mean, who do they think they are, would you say "school" like that? Or "schematic"??? Or "schizophrenia"! They sound like those dirty Germans, pronouncing it differently than me... and other words that contain "sch" but are pronounced differently don't count because... reasons? They're way less common maybe? That's how you sound right now.
In the same vain, most west Slovak speakers can understand Czech with little difficulty and vice versa. Actually Slovak speakers can interact with most slavic speakers to a good degree. By your logic, Slovak is correct Czech or Ukrainian, but Scottish English isn't correct English. Hmmm...
You are silly for thinking that your pronunciation is "the correct" pronunciation. Your pronunciation is just as absurd as any other. Also people pronounce it with /dʒ/ because it just makes sense, and it generally is more common in certain areas of the country, you're acting like /gɪf/ is the pronunciation people first think when they see the word.
Also let's use your logic on other acronyms. NASA – well clearly /næ.sə/ is wronɡ, look at the other common word containing that sequence like "nasal"! Or how about LASER – well words like "eraser" and "chaser" disagree! Or yolo – "myology" and "embryology". OSHA – "turboshaft" and "goshawk". NATO– "senator", "anatomy", "urinatory", "natoma". How is GIF somehow the exception to not being consistent with pronunciation of words containing the same sequence of letters? Which by the way, as I pointed out with e.g. "spongiform", it is, but even if you want to ignore that.
I don't even care about you addressing the rest of my previous comment, I just want you to tell me, do you really think you know better than the dictionary folks? The people who's job is basically deciding what is ""correct"" language? The prescriptive linguistic institutions?