JIF always sounded better to me and more distinct from the hard G. Seems like the developer thought so too since that's what he called it.
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Whose fault is it that people think the G in GIF is pronounced like Give instead of Gin?
- Thread starter BAD
- Start date
jmon
A word of Arabic (zarāfa) origin morphing into French/Spanish girafe/giraffa with what is in those languages the normal soft G is not gonna win the argument. Jmon.
A word of Arabic (zarāfa) origin morphing into French/Spanish girafe/giraffa with what is in those languages the normal soft G is not gonna win the argument. Jmon.
Exactly.
And before anyone says 'but the inventor of the gif says it the other way'.
No.
That's not at all a rule so it was silly to bring up. Many of the most used acronyms don't use the individual word pronunciations.
With a hard G in protest. I spell it with a J like it always should have been. I shoot dead anyone who corrects me. The hills I am willing to die upon are small, but they are worthy mounds.
When I was young, before gifs were always animated and just another image format, I pronounced it soft-G "Gif" like the peanut butter brand. Someone shamed me for that in college in the early 2000s, and I stopped calling it gif and went to gif hard G, but I take solace knowing that my first inclination was the right one from the inventor of the file type.
I call it a "Gif" with a hard G now and have for ~20 years but... the way it was intended was a soft G and now I just don't care enough.
This is a great example
I call it a "Gif" with a hard G now and have for ~20 years but... the way it was intended was a soft G and now I just don't care enough.
This is a great example
That has an E at the end transforming it into a soft G though
exactly.
and using the "he's the parent of the thing so he gets to call it whatever" doesnt really work because we're not talking about a person. We're talking about Graphics Interchange Format, not the Jraphics Interchange Format.
He's the idiot, not the rest of us.
Jif is/was the name of a toilet cleaner or something over here so even if you had told me that gif is pronounced jif - I wouldn't have pronounced it thusly. Jif sounds stupid to me even now. Should have named the acronym Jif is they wanted it to be Jif.
When people find out there is already a file type actually named .JIF
filext.com
JIF File Extension - What is it? How to open a JIF file?
All about JIF JPEG/JIFF Images. Details for the JIF file extension and how to open an a JIF file. Filext.com
It's okay for something to have multiple pronunciations. Frankly, it's not as though mistakes adopted by the masses haven't been considered the "correct" choice in plenty of other cases, but it's especially prevalent in language. If enough people use a misspelling or mispronunciation or whatever on a regular basis, then it needs to be observed as valid in some sense.
Came here to make this emphatically. I cannot express how incensed I get when some smart arse says "the inventor said it so you must be wrong", like by inventing something using a technology you get to change the pronunciation and etymological language rules of the word. He's wrong and if you quote him you're wrong
But... what if...
Giraffe
Interchange
Format
Languages have rules, but English breaks so many so often it might as well not have them, at times. There's a reason it's one of the hardest to learn.
I really don't have any skin in this game, I'll say it however the hell I feel. I'm not going to let a blowhard that thinks they're right on either side of the nonsense debate tell me I'm wrong. It doesn't matter if everyone knows what we mean. Unless we're talking about peanut butter.
gentle
giraffe
generous
giant
gentlemen
generation
generate
gem
soft Gs exist. they move in silence, like lasagna.
I'm on team hard G tho. but it really doesn't matter. If y'all know what i mean when i ask about that "ghif" or "jhif", that's good enough for me.
giraffe
generous
giant
gentlemen
generation
generate
gem
soft Gs exist. they move in silence, like lasagna.
I'm on team hard G tho. but it really doesn't matter. If y'all know what i mean when i ask about that "ghif" or "jhif", that's good enough for me.
Language rules for the words behind acronyms have little to do with how the acronym itself gets pronounced. If anything, acronyms prove that they are able to have their own pronunciation that doesn't hint at the pronunciation of the words inspiring it.
No, that proves that false pronunciations often gain some footing, like it has with anyone who is going round saying Jif
You got any examples, out of curiosity?
Re reading your OP and your argument seems to be that his is allowed to give the thing a name, like a parent? Is that really what's happened when its an acronym?
language does have rules! Which is why 'Gift' is an exception and normally 'I', 'e' and 'y' after a 'G' make it soft. ;P
It's usually Latin based loan words And standard English that do it. Germanic derived English uses the hard 'G'. I learned French when I was younger (a decade before I would ever experience a .gif and I go for the soft 'G'. I wonder if you have exposure to Latin based languages if you're more likely to follow the (correct!) soft g pronunciation?
Its also a new word. The acronym part doesn't matter! If you're out there repping your Gift-GIF you better also be pronouncing sonar as 'Sawnar'.
Gif sounds 1000x better to say than Jif, which happens to already belong to a peanut butter brand.
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