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As you can see by the results of the survey, you are indeed in the minority here. It is a hard-G. Anachronisms and appeals to authority (the originator's prefer

As you can see by the results of the survey, you are indeed in the minority here. It is a hard-G. Anachronisms and appeals to authority (the originator's preference) bear little weight here - a word is added to a language on consensus, and most of us prefer that hard-G. Furthermore, since the G represents the hard-G word 'Graphic' it only makes sense. Subjectively, I feel that the soft-G is milquetoast mild to the degree that it's unpleasant to say or hear. Insipid like a cold bland porridge. Hard-G has all the zest, all the pizazz!

XorNot 5y ago
There's also a cleaning product named "Jif" in Australia. Saying "Gif" as "jif" seems very redundant - why even have different letters? Though it does seem to be an American thing - we pronounce the H in pretty much all words too, whereas Americans tend to make a lot of "H" sounds silent.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > There's also a cleaning product named "Jif" in Australia And a peanut butter in the US. So what? > Saying "Gif" as "jif" seems very redundant - why even have different letters? English is...rather unconcerned with having an absence of duplication of sounds between letters (“c” and “x” are pretty much completely redundant with other letters, and there are plenty of overlaps on the other letters in represented sounds.)
dragonwriter 5y ago
> a word is added to a language on consensus, and most of us prefer that hard-G. To the extent this is true, it's only in a sense where consensus is much more than mere majority preference and it's absence, and thus the absence of a single correct pronunciation, is also possible and, in fact, common; for GIF, there is an absence of consensus on pronunciation, and thus a diversity of pronunciations with shifting popularity. Your preference may be the eventual consensus, but English can maintain words with multiple pronunciations with shifting popularity over a very long term without settling to general consensus, so maybe not.
- xmprt 5y ago
  This is the only right response to this "debate" People can call it whichever they want. If you say gif or jif and someone else corrects you then they're just being dumb. Clearly they understood what you meant and until consensus is almost unanimous (around 90-99%) both pronunciations are fine. I also don't think the creator's pronunciation matters. If they originally said it should be pronounced jife but people were between jif and gif then saying either jif and gif would make sense in conversation but jife wouldn't.
- Lewton 5y ago
  How can you call it lack of consensus when it’s 80-20, especially considering it’s an extremely skewed sample (techies are way more likely to pronounce it jif) I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > (techies are way more likely to pronounce it jif) Oh? Why do you say that? I mean, I doubt knowing what the creator said has that big of an impact but maybe I'm wrong on that. > I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G Show me a poll that doesn't tell you the answer in the options. When one of the answers is "gif", and it wins as the pronunciation for "gif", that's a useless result.
    - Lewton 5y ago
      > Oh? Why do you say that? I mean, I doubt knowing what the creator said has that big of an impact but maybe I'm wrong on that. Are you gonna argue that there exists a significant number of people that would pronounce it jif with no prompting? That's quite a stretch
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        I was saying it long before hearing anything about the inventor. When you say 'no prompting', you mean just finding it in text with no context? Hell if I know whether people blindly guess it's like "give" or "gin" but neither one seems super obvious over the other unless you treat it like it's derived from the word "gift". If you say it in front of someone and they possibly correct you, I don't know why the techy version would differ from the average person version.
dnautics 5y ago
> since the G represents the hard-G word 'Graphic' it only makes sense. Would it also "make sense" to pronounce jpeg "jay-feg"? Or "nasa" "neh-sa"? Or "laser" "lah-ssur"?
kgeist 5y ago
>Anachronisms and appeals to authority (the originator's preference) bear little weight here - a word is added to a language on consensus If you watch Back to the Future (which came out in 1985), Dr Brown pronounces gigawatts as jigawatts, and now the common pronunciation has a hard G. It has the same initial gi-, so I guess sometime in the 1990's the trend was to prefer hard G over soft G in technical words which start with gi-.
- ghusbands 5y ago
  Back to the Future is only evidence of what that actor or the film's creator believed. It's not a well-researched documentary. The original pronunciation is with a hard g, though there was a brief period after the US National Bureau of Standards claimed otherwise where some people in America thought otherwise. At least according to [0]. [0] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-prefix-giga-originally-pronounced-jiga-What-is-the-reason-the-pronunciation-shifted https://www.quora.com/Was-the-prefix-giga-originally-pronoun...
  - kgeist 5y ago
    >In 1998, a poll by the phonetician John C. Wells found that 84% of Britons preferred the pronunciation of gigabyte starting with /ɡɪ/ (as in gig), 9% with /dʒɪ/ (as in jig) Roughly every 10th person pronouncing it with a soft G doesn't sound like an "anomaly" of a single movie to me (as claimed in the quora post), more like a less common variant. >It's not a well-researched documentary. Of course, it's not. But it gives us audio evidence that some people in the 1980's pronounced it with a soft G (or thought it's pronounced with a soft G because they wouldn't usually use -- and hear -- the word IRL, just like with GIF's)

XorNot 5y ago

There's also a cleaning product named "Jif" in Australia. Saying "Gif" as "jif" seems very redundant - why even have different letters? Though it does seem to be an American thing - we pronounce the H in pretty much all words too, whereas Americans tend to make a lot of "H" sounds silent.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> There's also a cleaning product named "Jif" in Australia And a peanut butter in the US. So what? > Saying "Gif" as "jif" seems very redundant - why even have different letters? English is...rather unconcerned with having an absence of duplication of sounds between letters (“c” and “x” are pretty much completely redundant with other letters, and there are plenty of overlaps on the other letters in represented sounds.)

dragonwriter 5y ago

> a word is added to a language on consensus, and most of us prefer that hard-G. To the extent this is true, it's only in a sense where consensus is much more than mere majority preference and it's absence, and thus the absence of a single correct pronunciation, is also possible and, in fact, common; for GIF, there is an absence of consensus on pronunciation, and thus a diversity of pronunciations with shifting popularity. Your preference may be the eventual consensus, but English can maintain words with multiple pronunciations with shifting popularity over a very long term without settling to general consensus, so maybe not.

xmprt 5y ago
This is the only right response to this "debate" People can call it whichever they want. If you say gif or jif and someone else corrects you then they're just being dumb. Clearly they understood what you meant and until consensus is almost unanimous (around 90-99%) both pronunciations are fine. I also don't think the creator's pronunciation matters. If they originally said it should be pronounced jife but people were between jif and gif then saying either jif and gif would make sense in conversation but jife wouldn't.
Lewton 5y ago
How can you call it lack of consensus when it’s 80-20, especially considering it’s an extremely skewed sample (techies are way more likely to pronounce it jif) I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > (techies are way more likely to pronounce it jif) Oh? Why do you say that? I mean, I doubt knowing what the creator said has that big of an impact but maybe I'm wrong on that. > I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G Show me a poll that doesn't tell you the answer in the options. When one of the answers is "gif", and it wins as the pronunciation for "gif", that's a useless result.
  - Lewton 5y ago
    > Oh? Why do you say that? I mean, I doubt knowing what the creator said has that big of an impact but maybe I'm wrong on that. Are you gonna argue that there exists a significant number of people that would pronounce it jif with no prompting? That's quite a stretch
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      I was saying it long before hearing anything about the inventor. When you say 'no prompting', you mean just finding it in text with no context? Hell if I know whether people blindly guess it's like "give" or "gin" but neither one seems super obvious over the other unless you treat it like it's derived from the word "gift". If you say it in front of someone and they possibly correct you, I don't know why the techy version would differ from the average person version.

dnautics 5y ago

> since the G represents the hard-G word 'Graphic' it only makes sense. Would it also "make sense" to pronounce jpeg "jay-feg"? Or "nasa" "neh-sa"? Or "laser" "lah-ssur"?

kgeist 5y ago

>Anachronisms and appeals to authority (the originator's preference) bear little weight here - a word is added to a language on consensus If you watch Back to the Future (which came out in 1985), Dr Brown pronounces gigawatts as jigawatts, and now the common pronunciation has a hard G. It has the same initial gi-, so I guess sometime in the 1990's the trend was to prefer hard G over soft G in technical words which start with gi-.

ghusbands 5y ago
Back to the Future is only evidence of what that actor or the film's creator believed. It's not a well-researched documentary. The original pronunciation is with a hard g, though there was a brief period after the US National Bureau of Standards claimed otherwise where some people in America thought otherwise. At least according to [0]. [0] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-prefix-giga-originally-pronounced-jiga-What-is-the-reason-the-pronunciation-shifted https://www.quora.com/Was-the-prefix-giga-originally-pronoun...
- kgeist 5y ago
  >In 1998, a poll by the phonetician John C. Wells found that 84% of Britons preferred the pronunciation of gigabyte starting with /ɡɪ/ (as in gig), 9% with /dʒɪ/ (as in jig) Roughly every 10th person pronouncing it with a soft G doesn't sound like an "anomaly" of a single movie to me (as claimed in the quora post), more like a less common variant. >It's not a well-researched documentary. Of course, it's not. But it gives us audio evidence that some people in the 1980's pronounced it with a soft G (or thought it's pronounced with a soft G because they wouldn't usually use -- and hear -- the word IRL, just like with GIF's)