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Some people persist in calling "GIF", "jif", so whaddayagonnado?
by ci5er 7y ago
Some people persist in calling "GIF", "jif", so whaddayagonnado?
- tasty_freeze 7y agoI pronounce it with the hard "g", and I'd happily ignore the few people that pronounce it with the soft "g", except that the guy who invented the format intended it to be pronounced "jiff".
- ci5er 7y agoYes. Being old, I remember. Well, considering that the "G" stood for "Graphics" and that "Graphics", in my native American English has a hard-g, I'm just going to declare the author of the format to be a troglodyte and go on from there. (Not that there's anything wrong with that - many of us tech-types are troglodytes and misanthropes and lack a classical education)
- samatman 7y agoI insist on the pronunciation "jayfeg" for JPEG, for the same reason.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y agoDo you also pronounce 'giraffe' and 'giant' with a hard "g"?
- harry8 7y agojrafics interchange format is exactly how you say it long. Why is this even a discussion?
- krallja 7y ago“joint potographic experts group”
- ScottBurson 7y agoDo you pronounce "gift" with a soft 'g'?
- _emacsomancer_ 7y agoNo, but "gift" is a borrowing from Old Norse. "GIF", as far as I know, is not an Old Norse lexical item.
- ScottBurson 7y agoIt's still a very common English word that's spelled very similarly. One can hardly be surprised if people guessing at the pronunciation of "GIF" select a hard 'g'.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y agoSure. So English has some words which start with "gi-" which have hard 'g's ('gift', 'give', 'girl', 'giggle') and some which have soft 'g's ('giant', 'giraffe', 'gibber', 'ginger'), so both pronunciations are actually reasonable in English for the orthographic form 'GIF'.
- ScottBurson 7y agoI'm glad we agree.
- ptx 7y agoThers's an idea - revise the expansion of the acronym to say Giraffics Interchange Format. Make it an ISO standard and donate proceeds of sales of the paper version to protecting the giraffes. Problem solved.