I personally find arguing pronunciation as entirely pointless when there are many words in English that get pronounced different based on a multitude of factors.
People also like to argue it’s an acronym, but do you pronounce NASA the same as you pronounce the first letter of each word of National Aeronautics and Space Administration?
Yeah, I have friends who say it with a hard g and I never say a damn thing, but I say jif once and it’s “jraphics” this and “jod” that. I get it, you watched that stupid video in 2012, congrats.
Maybe we should up the ante on this war, and start actively making fun of those who be hating on peanut butter. There are plenty of arguments for either pronunciation, but jiffers are losing the war bc we’re being so passive. Just living our lives, as if the pronunciation of a word doesn’t fucking matter if everyone knows what you mean…. We need to eradicate the culture of soft-g giffers
I understand your point in the creator but I find fault in that argument.
Historically it doesn’t matter what the creator of anything prefers unless it’s an “unveiling” and they name it on the spot. People in general will take something and run with it regardless of the creators intent. The perfect example is “light saber” versus “laser sword.” (Edit forgot to add the word sword after laser)
To be honest I don’t care all that much. If you say jif or gift without the t, either way I know what you are talking about.
Historically it doesn’t matter what the creator of anything prefers unless it’s an “unveiling” and they name it on the spot.
I can’t for the life of me find it now, but the gif was introduced with an image that contained in its metadata a statement that “it’s pronounced jif”. You can still find it somewhere and open it in notepad and read it for yourself.
People also like to argue it’s an acronym, but do you pronounce NASA the same as you pronounce the first letter of each word of National Aeronautics and Space Administration?
Um, yes?
I’m assuming we’re talking about the two A letters here, since nothing comes to mind about a different pronunciation of N or S in American English.
In American English - at least in my experience - the first sound in aeronautics is exactly the same as in “air,” which is also the same as in “administration.” We don’t generally say it as in “ear-onautocs.”
Also, I’m curious - has anyone ever published a study describing whether or not the difference in pronunciation differs between sectors in the computer science community? Particularly, is there a difference between normal developers and those who write in a Lisp?
SCUBA, LASER, JPEG, ROM, etc. all break the “pronounced as the nested word” argument.
I’m down for people to pronounce it however they please (assuming it’s recognizable as gif), but the post-hoc rationalizations trying to prove their side as the one true pronunciation are silly. The only rationalization that makes any sense to me is the “creator pronounces it as jif”, but language doesn’t work that way so even that doesn’t matter as far as “one true pronunciation” goes.
What did the creator of the GIF name them? Imagine if a bunch of people read your name wrong, then when you told them how it’s pronounced said that they don’t care, and your mom was wrong to pronounce your name that way.
Eh, I prefer the descriptivist method of language. It’s how language evolves over time.
Comparing it to a personal name is a false equivalence. GIF is an acronym, people could enunciate each letter if they so preferred and it would be more accurate/true to creation than even the creator’s opinion of how to pronounce it.
Except he didn’t invent the words used to name what he invented. If he had just named it gif and pronounced it jif and non of those letters stood for anything I would see your point, but he didn’t. He named it graphic interchange format, shortened to gif. That said, who gives a shit pronounce it how you want. Language evolves anyways.
Nobody pronounces it with a hard G because of what the G stands for. Acronyms don’t work like that. They do it because a hard G is more common when starting words in English than a soft one.
I see what you’re saying, and to a point I agree. I see it as people reading it a certain way in their head and becoming attached to how they think it should sound. This happens often because English words especially can have all manner of exceptions to the usual rules of spelling and grammar. There is nothing embarrassing about reading, or at least there shouldn’t be. What I DO find embarrassing is when people find out that they’re pronouncing something differently and flat out disagree with the world about its actual pronounciation.
What I DO find embarrassing is when people find out that they’re pronouncing something differently and flat out disagree with the world about its actual pronounciation.
Man, you must be embarrassed all the time when you hear British or American people talk.
Somehow the world can survive and we can understand one another with very different pronunciations of words like “Aluminum”, but this… THIS WILL NOT STAND!
I refuse to call it anything but Aluminum just for that. I find it insulting to Sir Humphrey Davey that his naming rights were basically stolen by someone completely unrelated.
Island was originally spelt without an ‘s’. It was later added as a stylistic choice and is now the “correct” spelling. Language doesn’t give a fuck about original intent. If you want to be originalist about it then you need to hie back to corky English
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