Unlike all the other questions which are subjective or philosophical, it’s gif with a J for f*s sake. It’s what we called it in the 80s, it’s what the creator called it, it’s Jif goddamnit.
The K in knight appears to have turned up in the American pronunciation of "schedule".
(what letters are used to describe how the word "gif" should not be pronounced?)
You could pretty easily update the sign to say "it's pronounced gif, not ghif".
Subjectively, I feel that the soft-G is milquetoast mild to the degree that it's unpleasant to say or hear. Insipid like a cold bland porridge. Hard-G has all the zest, all the pizazz!
Though it does seem to be an American thing - we pronounce the H in pretty much all words too, whereas Americans tend to make a lot of "H" sounds silent.
And a peanut butter in the US. So what?
> Saying "Gif" as "jif" seems very redundant - why even have different letters?
English is...rather unconcerned with having an absence of duplication of sounds between letters (“c” and “x” are pretty much completely redundant with other letters, and there are plenty of overlaps on the other letters in represented sounds.)
To the extent this is true, it's only in a sense where consensus is much more than mere majority preference and it's absence, and thus the absence of a single correct pronunciation, is also possible and, in fact, common; for GIF, there is an absence of consensus on pronunciation, and thus a diversity of pronunciations with shifting popularity. Your preference may be the eventual consensus, but English can maintain words with multiple pronunciations with shifting popularity over a very long term without settling to general consensus, so maybe not.
People can call it whichever they want. If you say gif or jif and someone else corrects you then they're just being dumb. Clearly they understood what you meant and until consensus is almost unanimous (around 90-99%) both pronunciations are fine. I also don't think the creator's pronunciation matters. If they originally said it should be pronounced jife but people were between jif and gif then saying either jif and gif would make sense in conversation but jife wouldn't.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
Oh? Why do you say that? I mean, I doubt knowing what the creator said has that big of an impact but maybe I'm wrong on that.
> I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
Show me a poll that doesn't tell you the answer in the options. When one of the answers is "gif", and it wins as the pronunciation for "gif", that's a useless result.
Are you gonna argue that there exists a significant number of people that would pronounce it jif with no prompting? That's quite a stretch
When you say 'no prompting', you mean just finding it in text with no context? Hell if I know whether people blindly guess it's like "give" or "gin" but neither one seems super obvious over the other unless you treat it like it's derived from the word "gift".
If you say it in front of someone and they possibly correct you, I don't know why the techy version would differ from the average person version.
I personally don't know anyone who'd pronounce it with a j sound and I severely doubt anyone in my country would default to a j sound, but I'm open to that being cultural. I just think the fact that hard G wins by such a landslide is pretty good evidence that defaulting to a j sound is incredibly rare
A 20/80 split in a poll in a world in which lots of people are correcting others towards a hard G indicates that there's plenty of people choosing to pronounce it like "gin" or "gist" or "gelatin" or "genius" or "generous" or "genetic" or "giant" or "gymnast" or "ginger" or ...
Because, even if this were a valid (random sample of the target population) survey, 1 in 5 is a lot, especially given the fact that the distribution of pronunciation is not homogeneous geographically or by other divides that define distinct subgroups of language use.
> I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
I think the existence of ongoing debate among speakers of the language as to the correct pronunciation is strong evidence that there is no consensus.
Would it also "make sense" to pronounce jpeg "jay-feg"? Or "nasa" "neh-sa"? Or "laser" "lah-ssur"?
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-.
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-pronoun...
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)
How about girl as jirl?
Giraffe as jiraffe?
Frankly, I reserve my right to not care and have fun with language -- instead of being a curmudgeon (there's no point except to feel better about oneself).
> Giraffe as jiraffe? ??
"Spoken with the confidence of a man who's been spelling 'giraffe' as 'diraffe' for the last 20 years."
You do you, but Graphics having a hard G doesn't force GIF to any more than the Amplification in LASER forces the pronunciation of its A, or Stimulated its S, or Emission its E. Or do you and your friends also say "lasseer" instead of "layzur"? This is an arbitrary choice you've made in one case but not the other.
Plus, pronunciations change. I assume you don’t go around demanding people pronounce knife ‘kunifuh,’ right?
Knife used to be pronounced k'nife. This slowly faded over time and is now completely eliminated.
By analog, jif being the original pronunciation is not important because the majority of people have decided to go with a hard G.
In other words, the "correct" spelling or pronunciation of words is democratic.
A chicken egg is not synonymous with an egg cell, or ovum. The fertilized ovum of course belongs to the creature it will grow into -- it is the creature it will grow into -- and so certainly the chicken ovum came before -- or at the same time as -- the chicken. But when we say "egg" we are referring to the vessel with a shell that houses the fertilized ovum until it hatches. [1]
This vessel is made of of various proteins and nutrients, produced by the mother that laid the egg, and a calcium carbonate shell, also made entirely by the mother. This egg, created entirely by the mother and not by the union of an ovum and sperm cell and any mutations that happened then, belongs entirely to the mother.
If Proto-chicken mother has laid clutch after clutch of eggs, all those are proto-chicken eggs. When one of those clutches happens to have a mutant that we arbitrarily declare is a "chicken," the egg itself has not changed in any way, only the DNA of the organism housed in the egg.
So, on thinking about it, I want to go back and change my answer.
Doesn't matter what it was, "G"if is what it is. Who knows what it will be.
This gives us an easy solution to make everyone happy though! We gust have to change "graphics" to be pronounced as "jraphics"
Whether to prescribe language or not is somewhat arbitrary at times and is determined culturally, so I don't think the argument above can be resolved.
There seem to be plenty of people who will argue to conserve grammar/spelling/semantics etc. I can't say their work is unfruitful, yet it does seem to be the case that language follows the habits of the majority.
There is more than one canonical way to pronounce things, even names. For example, what's the correct way to pronounce Arkansas?
The real issue here is people trying to assert there is only one correct way to pronounce it.
No it’s not, plenty of people are very much of aware of the intended pronunciation and still choose to pronounce it another way.