I think that words have meaning. And the meaning can be true, but pronunciation is not part of the true part. It is only the color of the arrow pointing at truth.
I pronounce oil differently than my cousin in Texas, and I pronounce car differently than my uncle in New Jersey. And to use pre-Modern English (~1500) era spelling ideas we would spell those words differently and probably use different alphabets. And spelling became a standard thing in English around 1750 when Johnson’s dictionary became so celebrated and a primary reference.
So there is slippage in spelling and pronunciation.
We should just go ahead and pronounce all acronyms the way their unabbreviated forms’ first syllable letters are said. Just ignore we treat individual letters differently than the words they came from.
The CIA should sound like “see ya” Department of Transportation “Duht” Internal Revenue Service “ears”
It wasn’t a real suggestion. A bit of hyperbole and exaggeration due to the pointless debate over jig/gif. We have a long precedent of pronouncing acronyms as initialisms and not enunciating the letters as they were pronounced in their original word. While I think the original argument over jif/gif was for fun, some can’t let it go.
Ah, bunkers. You see, bunkers have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I will send wave after wave of my own men at them, until they reach their limit and shutdown.
it’s an acronym (as opposed to initialisms, which are not pronounced as a single word). There is no rule on pronunciation.
scuba nato laser
We don’t do this for any other acronym. There is no rule about the pronunciation. It’s arbitrary. The creator chose “jif”, so that’s the “canonical” one.
Yes, the time when you eat gingerbread and drink ginormous amounts of gin, if you get the gist
Let’s hang everybody who claims that gif is pronounced jiff, but not because (as you seem to imply) that’s not how “gi” is read in English because nothing is read always like anything ever in English
All English words that start "gif-" (and for that matter "giv-") have a hard g.
While English is well known for a mess of exceptions, GIF has, or had, no precedent for soft G, so you'll forgive people for thinking that the choice of soft G on GIF is a little unusual and being rubbed the wrong way by it.
All words that start with “gif” have a hard g because there is only one: gift. If “gift” had a soft g, then all the words that start with “gif-“ would have a soft g. If it only has one case of application it’s an accident, not a rule.
And again, saying this as somebody who agrees on “gif” having a hard g despite the delirious claims of its inventor.
havent been on there but from a quick glance looks to be a lively discussion on our beloved moving image standard. shameless plug: we also have a lovely knot making community.
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