5 ms·

To 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 alr

To 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 ago
Homophones are valid words with valid pronunciations and we have a ton of them in English.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Sure, 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 ago
How 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 ago
Well, 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 ago
  Yes 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)
  - dnautics 5y ago
    > The majority of people Is this true? Basically a lot of people in europe will jump to soft g. Will latin america pronounce "gi" as the aspirated H?. Don't know anything about the countries in africa, I hear nigeria is pretty big and there's a lot of tech coming out of there. India (big elephant, pun intended) I suppose is hard g, but what about china -- I have no clue? Japan (120M, almost half the population of US, mind you) is exclusively soft g -- likely because hard g collides with the name of a prefecture (province). Korea I think is hard g (50 m, almost all very tech-savvy). Indonesia?

kube-system 5y ago

Homophones are valid words with valid pronunciations and we have a ton of them in English.

thehappypm 5y ago
Sure, 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 ago

How 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 ago

Well, 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 ago
Yes 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)
- dnautics 5y ago
  > The majority of people Is this true? Basically a lot of people in europe will jump to soft g. Will latin america pronounce "gi" as the aspirated H?. Don't know anything about the countries in africa, I hear nigeria is pretty big and there's a lot of tech coming out of there. India (big elephant, pun intended) I suppose is hard g, but what about china -- I have no clue? Japan (120M, almost half the population of US, mind you) is exclusively soft g -- likely because hard g collides with the name of a prefecture (province). Korea I think is hard g (50 m, almost all very tech-savvy). Indonesia?