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You can pronounce any word any way you like to. The only reason to pronounce some word a certain way is out of respect. The creators of the gif format called
by throw7 5y ago
You can pronounce any word any way you like to. The only reason to pronounce some word a certain way is out of respect. The creators of the gif format called it "jif" as a riff on jif peanut butter. End.
- Scarblac 5y agoI pronounce it with a guttural "g" as normal in Dutch, and that option is missing :(
- yesenadam 5y agoSince learning spanish I've pronounced it with a slightly throaty H sound (and GIMP that way also), closer to yours I guess than hard-g gif or jiff.
- alexfromapex 5y agoAnyone who says gif must also maintain consistency when saying giraffe. Otherwise, you are living too dangerously for me. Edit: I think a lot of people thought I was serious. Just joking around.
- sjburt 5y agogin, gift, giraffe, giggle
- ruph123 5y agogit
- throwaway56ss7 5y agoI frequently work with some people in Argentina and they pronounce git as an English speaker might say “jit” We never discus image formats tho. I’ll have to ask them about GIF next time.
- dylan604 5y agoThe English call the Thames river Tims. Spanish call Barcelona Barthelona, and Ibiza Ibitha. So I don't put much in native pronounciations. Otherwise, if they are pronouncing it correctly, they need to go back to spelling skool!! Don't get me started on Stuyvesant! ;-) /s in case it's not obvious
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chris_st 5y agoSo how do you pronounce "gill"?
- mypalmike 5y agoThe unit of measure? "Jill".
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> The unit of measure? You wouldn't think "the breathing apparatus of a fish" before "the unit of measure"? When was the last time you saw something measured in gills?
- mypalmike 5y agoWhen I lived in Scotland around 25 years ago, many bars in the Highlands advertised the size of their whiskey measures in terms of gills (and I was laughed at for mispronouncing the term!). I'm not sure if it's still common. So for me, it does actually come to mind at least as readily as fish anatomy.
- 7v3x3n3sem9vv 5y agoJill, obviously. /s
- kgm 5y agoThere is no sense in which English pronunciation can be described as "consistent." As supporting evidence, may I introduce the poem "The Chaos": https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
- Sebb767 5y agoAs a non-native speaker who mostly reads English, this makes me very worried about my pronunciation.
- stevebmark 5y agoThe P in JPEG stands for "photo." You don't pronounce it "jpheg." English isn't a consistent language, and to try to apply consistent pronunciation is a failure in abstract thinking.
- howdydoo 5y agoYou've made a giant gaffe.
- greggman3 5y agoI know you were joking. My favorite example is ghoti "gh" from laugh, "o" from "women", "ti" from "tion" (like nation") so "ghoti" can be pronounced the same as "fish"
- Dylan16807 5y agoI will go ahead and note that such a construction violates a ton of pronunciation rules. Yes english has those.
- spiffytech 5y agoThe argument over this always frustrates me. People argue about which pronunciation is correct, but for a made-up word, the creator is the only one who can decide what's correct. People are free to ignore the creator's wishes or do something different out of personal preference or disagree about what should be correct, but if the creator pronounced gif "Throatwobbler Mangrove" that'd still be the only thing that counts as "correct".
- e1g 5y agoRight, but when the president declares it’s a hard g… well, the guy with the most nukes wins. https://time.com/2871272/obama-tumblr-gif-wars/ https://time.com/2871272/obama-tumblr-gif-wars/
- JohnAaronNelson 5y agoThere is no objectively correct way to pronounce anything. The only correctness that matters is if you were understood correctly. In that case both are correct, but they each are different signals.
- dylan604 5y agoEven in normal everyday conversational words let alone tech words. People in New England pronounce words differently than people in Minnesota or the South. Hell, in Texas, syllables are seemingly added to words in our pronunciations.
- marcan_42 5y agoAll words are made up. The creator can certainly suggest whatever pronunciation they think should be used, but if most of the world decides otherwise, tough luck. "Correct" language is whatever language is most widely used and understood by people. Linguistics is a descriptive discipline, not a prescriptive one.
- knome 5y ago>the creator is the only one who can decide what's correct When I was young I never understood the French idea of 'the death of the author'. I found the idea of ignoring the author's intentions in writing a novel, and of ignoring their clarifications regarding the novel, quite absurd. In time, I have found myself more on the side of this idea. An author can create something, but this does not give them dictates over how it is interpreted by the rest of us. Creation need not imply authority over understanding, nor later insights inspired from a work. I'm not sure the pronunciation of an acronym for an image format quite fits into the concept of literary criticism, but I can't say that I'll ever be too bothered that the original author has had the misfortune of pronouncing their own format incorrectly.
- Barrin92 5y agothere's some leeway in how to pronounce things but obviously communication requires consensus on how to transmit things or else you can't exchange any information. See two people in very different thick accents trying to speak to each other in the same language.
- derbOac 5y agoLanguage follows patterns for all sorts of reasons. Some of it has to do with priors based on other words, or beliefs about pronunciation and so forth based on other information, or in many cases, the physiology of the throat, mouth, and tongue. People will do whatever they want and it doesn't matter what the originator of a word wanted or intended. I don't say this out of disrespect; language is a sort of chaotic dynamic group-level system, and what happens initially is only one small input.
- mastax 5y agoThe only reason to pronounce some word a certain way is to facilitate communication with other people. It helps to pronounce things the same as the plurality of people you are talking to, to reduce barriers to understanding.
- thehappypm 5y agoTo me it’s gotta be different from “jif” because that’s already a word with a different spelling. I think that’s why there’s a tiebreaker: because “jiff” is already a different word, I jump to “gif”.
- kube-system 5y agoHomophones are valid words with valid pronunciations and we have a ton of them in English.
- thehappypm 5y agoSure, but I feel like when I encounter a new word, my brain assumes a homophone is less likely than two words having different pronunciations.
- chaboud 5y agoHow there can be more than two ways to spell words that sound like “to” is just too much. When people do that, I wonder if they’re messing with me or if their minds have fallen prey to a language of many sources. I pray that we will one day have eliminated all of the homophones. Then we will have truly won. Eye think ewe agree…
- dnautics 5y agoWell, the creator proposed it to be called "jiff" to specifically reference that word. Because Gifs are compressed, they would download much faster (a jiffy) over slow dialup internet connection than a bmp.
- greggman3 5y agoYes but the creator screwed up in thinking that people were going to read the minutia of their document. The majority of people seeing "gif" with no instruction would use a hard-g. If they know it stands for "Graphics Interchange Format", again they'd use a hard-g. They screwed up (unless their goal was to cause all this endless useless discussion :P)
- jhgb 5y ago> You can pronounce any word any way you like to. OK, I'm pronouncing GIF as 'throatwobbler mangrove', then.
- Damogran6 5y agoThroatwaRbler...
- eyelidlessness 5y agoI for one welcome the giraffe interchange format.
- ThinBold 5y agoPay respect to the author and also to people who use the word and want easy pronunciations so they can spend more time on what's more useful. If, say, our lovely Indian instructors on youtube decide that gif is git but with f, then let it be, for that they are making contributions.
- professorsnep 5y agoI really don't like any argument for how to pronounce ".gif", so I pronounce it in as many ways as possible to try to annoy people. Here's a wonderful video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmqy-Sp0txY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmqy-Sp0txY
- jcims 5y agoI like how we all know this is impossible to settle and yet wade in with our arguments anyway. Graphics Interchange Format Try to say Graphics with a soft G.
- dylan604 5y agoSay Graphics with a mouthful of Jif peanut butter and see how it sounds!!!
- jcims 5y agoI think you may have converted me. xD
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Try to say Graphics with a soft G. That's not exactly difficult to do, though it would be spelled "draphics". It's difficult to see what this is supposed to be relevant to; acronyms are never given pronunciations taken from their hidden constituent words. Try to say "stimulated" with a /z/ (as in "LASER").
- xscott 5y ago> Try to say "stimulated" with a /z/ (as in "LASER"). Yup, and there are plenty of others too: SCUBA - U as in uh-nderwater SIM / VIN - I as in I-dentification YOLO - second O as in wuh-nce CAPTCHA - first A as in aw-tomated AWOL - soft a-bsent ICE - ih-mmigration and Customs Enforcement NATO - soft A-tlantic OCONUS - ow-tside OSHA - ah-ccupational SCOTUS / POTUS - uh-f AIDS - a-cquired It's really a long list if you look. I vote for GIF with a J sound.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoIt bothers me a little that all of your examples are vowels. Especially when you include OSHA in the list of examples. It's not the Shafety and Shealth Administration.
- icambron 5y agoThere's no meaningful argument on how to pronounce "gif" except "how do people pronounce gif?". Otherwise we're all going to comb through historical records to find out who first said "gift" or "giraffe". But we can all have preferences, and in some small way be part of the process of pushing English in one direction or another. So here's my pitch for the hard g: Ambiguous letters are very annoying. I'm teaching my kids to read and it's very frustrating. C is sometimes like sometimes like k (except when k is followed by n) and sometimes like s (except when s is followed by h), unless c is followed by h in which case...you get the idea. We have more sounds than letters, so some ambiguity is required by a sort of pigeonhole principle. It's weird, then, that we have multiple letters for the same sound. A misuse of resources. But at least C the rules are relatively clean. G is the worst of them, because you really can't tell. Gimble but giant, etc. So we ought to try to minimize the degree to which this happens because it makes English more approachable for everyone. If you coin a word starting with a "k" sound, start it with a k. And if you want something to start with "j" use a j. (If you want a hard g, you have to use a g, so that's settled already). Then, on the margins, English is slightly more consistent. With words where there's no consensus, you probably can't change the spelling (and with gif you surely can't) but the same logic applies: pick in the direction of less ambiguity. Since we already have a "j" sound, we should, where possible, make "g" hard. So say gif with a hard g for humanity.
- justsomehnguy 5y agoAmount of words which would be written in IPA as some variant of a 3 phonemes [k*t] but actually written with from 3 to 6 letters is astounding.
- jart 5y agoTed Kaczynski got caught by preferring to speak the correct way rather than the common way. So you may have a point. In the original Latin alphabet there wasn't even a G letter either. That's why for example CAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR was spelled without a G. If I remember correctly, the G had been invented by his time, but he preferred the traditionalist spelling for his first name, since strictly speaking archaic latin would probably spell his last name Kaesar, but K had fallen out of fashion at that time.
- Pxtl 5y agoWe're all used to the idea that the creator of a thing can be wrong about the thing at this point. Wizard poop and all.
- wkearney99 5y agoThere ought to be a 'law' (like Godwin's) that shuts down any debate about pronunciation if it devolves into mentioning the GIF file format.