3 ms·
>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
by 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 agoBack 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)