He’s the only one that can be considered an authority on how the word is pronounced LMAO.
He’s just the guy who invented the software and coined a name for it, he has no authority over how that should be pronounced. If he came up with a ridiculous pronunciation (as he did) he should be laughed at and people should use a sensible pronunciation.
Pronunciation isn’t based on spelling
Of course it is. That’s how spelling works. In English it isn’t nearly 1:1 like other languages, but spelling is very strongly tied to how a word is pronounced.
the English writing system isn’t consistent enough to make estimations for a pronunciation like that
Yes, it is. That’s why people pronounce it with a hard “g”, because they’ve internalized the rules for spelling vs. pronunciation in English and know that those 3 letters in that order has a hard g.
are pronounced wildly phonemically differently
There are slight differences in pronunciation, not wild differences. The differences are so slight that normally you can understand the word someone is using in another dialect without difficulty. And, in every English dialect “gift” has a hard g, as does “gif”.
English preserves the pronunciation and spelling of loan words
English doesn’t preserve the pronunciation. It approximates the pronunciation while keeping the spelling, and that pronunciation drifts over time and changes in different places. See: Lieutenant, a word that has two wildly different pronunciations in English, neither of which sound anything like the original French word.
There is no such thing as an objectively correct pronunciation
But, there are patterns to the language and using a soft “g” sound doesn’t follow those patterns, so it’s objectively a less correct pronunciation.
the guy who created it
Who cares about that guy? He made a mistake, he should have looked up how words are pronounced before trying to get people to mispronounce “gif”. If he’d said it was supposed to be pronounced “dug” people would have just ignored him, but his attempt wasn’t that absurd, it was just slightly wrong, so not everyone ignored him the way they should have.
instead of a group of people being dumbasses and laughing at a correct pronunciation
It really sounds like you didn’t have friends. The rest of us did.
Also how people speaking other languages handle names doesn’t have anything to do with this
Of course it does. How you pronounce things depends on the language you use. How people pronounce the letters “gif” is based on their language. In English, it’s a hard g.
I don’t want to chat with Chlorine Trifluoride, it’s nasty.
But yeah, there are some obscure situations where oxygen isn’t the oxidizing agent, but the name “oxidizer” gives a clue how rare that is. In most normal situations, oxygen is the oxidizer and the thing it reacts with is the fuel. Partially that’s due to Oxygen being a good electron acceptor, but mostly it’s because there’s a lot of oxygen in the planet, and anywhere you can have humans you pretty much need to have oxygen.
Meanwhile virtually every possible (and infrequent) side-effect of the vaccine is also a possible (and frequent) side-effect of COVID.
Like, cardiac issues are possible, very rare side effects of the vaccine. Cardiac issues are common side effects of getting COVID. So, even if you’re really worried about one specific side-effect of the vaccine like pulmonary embolism – guess what, you’re much more likely to have one if you don’t get the vaccine because then you’re much more likely to get it as a COVID side-effect.
If purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing (fosstodon.org)
I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
JPEG (lemmy.world)
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/167225794620221228after.png
big deal (jlai.lu)
Distros bad (feddit.de)
What did Canada do? (startrek.website)
They never admit they were just wrong (i.imgur.com)