There are, there are just exceptions. For example, an e at the end of the word is silent. I’m certain you can give me a word where it’s not, but there are at least six in this paragraph alone where it is.
One of the most common words with a final “e” in that paragraph is “the” which not only has a final “e” sound, but has two different final “e” sounds depending on the context: “the end” uses a /ði/ pronunciation but “the word” uses a /ðə/ pronunciation. English is very stupid.
But, I agree with your assessment. English has rules, or at least patterns. “G” is most often hard, not soft, because “J” is available for the soft version, but there’s no alternative for the hard version. English tends to follow patterns, and “gift” has a hard g, and it (and words based on it) are the only ones that start with “gif”, so every “gif” word is hard. Because “t” (unlike “e”) can’t change the sounds before it, the pattern says that “gif” should have a hard “g”.
If it were “gir”, then there would be more debate. The word “giraffe” has a soft “g” but “girl” has a hard one, so the pattern is more muddy.
Also, people who coin words don’t get to decide how they’ll be pronounced. They can certainly try, but they’ll often lose. There are plenty of words in English borrowed from other languages that not only sound nothing like the original language, but that sound nothing like they’d sound if they were English words. For example, “lingerie”. It’s a French word, but the English pronunciation sounds nothing like a French word. In fact, if someone just sounded out the word as if it were an English word, they’d probably get much closer to the French pronunciation than the awful “lawn-je-ray” which is the current accepted English pronunciation (though, they’d probably assume a hard “g” sound).
In this case, it’s too bad that Steve Wilhite didn’t have a background in linguistics or he would have realized that people would see “gif” and assume a hard “g”. It was a losing fight from the start because he either didn’t understand the assumptions people would have when they saw those letters, or he thought that somehow he could successfully fight the tide all by himself.
The newer pronunciation has become popular based on
The newer pronunciation has become popular based on their internalization of the obscure patterns of English pronunciation, informed by the most similar word: “gift” which uses a hard g. Everyone I know of started saying it with a hard g because that’s what made sense based on the spelling, long before hearing the weird thing about constituent words.
Nobody pronounced LASER as Lah-seer, which you’d have to do if you used “A as in Amplification” an “E as in Emission”.
Linus is the one who got a workable thing out in the public’s hands. He didn’t even want to name it Linux, but someone came up with that name and it stuck.
The GNU project did a lot of great things, but ultimately they weren’t able to get a full-fledged operating system out that people could use, so they lost the opportunity to name it. It really shouldn’t matter to them though. GNU is well known, its philosophies are critical to how the free software and open source communities work, it was basically a massive success in the way almost no other volunteer non-commercial projects ever are.
It’s more expensive than it needs to be, but it looks really pretty, and fundamentally it’s still coffee, just like MacOS is Unix-based under the hood.
A chromebook is more like a can of coke. It’s caffeinated, has mass-market appeal, but nobody’s going to be spending hours talking about just how great their can of coke is vs. someone else’s can of coke. A high-end chromebook is maybe a glass bottle of Mexican Coke.
Words in scrabble should be things that people actually use outside scrabble. It’s fair if that makes some leeway for slang. It’s also fair if it means that some really obscure words that nobody really uses get in. But, this seems over the line because they’re taking words that nobody uses, and tacking on un-grammatical endings.
Modern dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive. They don’t tell you how things should be spelled, or what meaning they should have. Instead, they report how things are spelled and what people think they mean in the real world.
We keep finding life on earth in places where we didn’t think life was possible. And yet, when we look at the stars we have the nerve to talk about there being a “goldilocks zone” for planets in other solar systems, like that’s the only way life could exist there.
I’m sure there’s life out there somewhere, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if carbon/water based life turns out to be a minority in the universe.
Yes, water is a simple compound made of some of the most common elements in the universe, so it’s reasonable to think other life might also evolve to use it. Carbon is also a really handy element for making complex molecules, and is also really common. But, it’s a failure of the imagination to think that life elsewhere has to follow the same basic chemistry as here on earth.
It’s not that they forget. You’re giving them too much credit. The reality is that being against many of the actions of a country is normal. People like Americans, like American movies, but are against many of the actions taken by the US military, the NSA, etc. People like Indians, but are against the actions of the Modi government. If you advocate against the policies of other governments you can get results. Your country can scale down its cooperation with them, or pressure them, or whatever. There’s always going to be some hatred of the country, hatred of the people of that country, hatred of the religion of the people of that country mixed in when the policies of any country are criticized. But, a reasonable person can focus on the main message.
By playing the “antisemitism” card, the Israelis who use it hope to insulate Israel from these normal kinds of criticisms. It’s really the only country that gets to play that kind of card, because it’s the only country founded in the immediate aftermath of a genocide, by the survivors of that genocide, and is the only place where Jews are a majority. They also get to pretend that any decision other than supporting Israel in everything it does is supporting the next genocide against Jews. The reality is that many of Israel’s actions are likely to encourage the next attempted genocide against Jews.