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Comment by throw7 | Hacker News Reader

You can pronounce any word any way you like to. The only reason to pronounce some word a certain way is out of respect. The creators of the gif format called it "jif" as a riff on jif peanut butter. End.

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There's no meaningful argument on how to pronounce "gif" except "how do people pronounce gif?". Otherwise we're all going to comb through historical records to find out who first said "gift" or "giraffe".

But we can all have preferences, and in some small way be part of the process of pushing English in one direction or another. So here's my pitch for the hard g:

Ambiguous letters are very annoying. I'm teaching my kids to read and it's very frustrating. C is sometimes like sometimes like k (except when k is followed by n) and sometimes like s (except when s is followed by h), unless c is followed by h in which case...you get the idea. We have more sounds than letters, so some ambiguity is required by a sort of pigeonhole principle. It's weird, then, that we have multiple letters for the same sound. A misuse of resources.

But at least C the rules are relatively clean. G is the worst of them, because you really can't tell. Gimble but giant, etc.

So we ought to try to minimize the degree to which this happens because it makes English more approachable for everyone. If you coin a word starting with a "k" sound, start it with a k. And if you want something to start with "j" use a j. (If you want a hard g, you have to use a g, so that's settled already). Then, on the margins, English is slightly more consistent.

With words where there's no consensus, you probably can't change the spelling (and with gif you surely can't) but the same logic applies: pick in the direction of less ambiguity. Since we already have a "j" sound, we should, where possible, make "g" hard.

So say gif with a hard g for humanity.

Amount of words which would be written in IPA as some variant of a 3 phonemes [k*t] but actually written with from 3 to 6 letters is astounding.

Ted Kaczynski got caught by preferring to speak the correct way rather than the common way. So you may have a point. In the original Latin alphabet there wasn't even a G letter either. That's why for example CAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR was spelled without a G. If I remember correctly, the G had been invented by his time, but he preferred the traditionalist spelling for his first name, since strictly speaking archaic latin would probably spell his last name Kaesar, but K had fallen out of fashion at that time.

The only reason to pronounce some word a certain way is to facilitate communication with other people. It helps to pronounce things the same as the plurality of people you are talking to, to reduce barriers to understanding.

> You can pronounce any word any way you like to.

OK, I'm pronouncing GIF as 'throatwobbler mangrove', then.

ThroatwaRbler...

The argument over this always frustrates me. People argue about which pronunciation is correct, but for a made-up word, the creator is the only one who can decide what's correct. People are free to ignore the creator's wishes or do something different out of personal preference or disagree about what should be correct, but if the creator pronounced gif "Throatwobbler Mangrove" that'd still be the only thing that counts as "correct".

Right, but when the president declares it’s a hard g… well, the guy with the most nukes wins. https://time.com/2871272/obama-tumblr-gif-wars/

There is no objectively correct way to pronounce anything. The only correctness that matters is if you were understood correctly. In that case both are correct, but they each are different signals.

Even in normal everyday conversational words let alone tech words. People in New England pronounce words differently than people in Minnesota or the South. Hell, in Texas, syllables are seemingly added to words in our pronunciations.

All words are made up. The creator can certainly suggest whatever pronunciation they think should be used, but if most of the world decides otherwise, tough luck. "Correct" language is whatever language is most widely used and understood by people. Linguistics is a descriptive discipline, not a prescriptive one.

>the creator is the only one who can decide what's correct

When I was young I never understood the French idea of 'the death of the author'. I found the idea of ignoring the author's intentions in writing a novel, and of ignoring their clarifications regarding the novel, quite absurd. In time, I have found myself more on the side of this idea.

An author can create something, but this does not give them dictates over how it is interpreted by the rest of us. Creation need not imply authority over understanding, nor later insights inspired from a work.

I'm not sure the pronunciation of an acronym for an image format quite fits into the concept of literary criticism, but I can't say that I'll ever be too bothered that the original author has had the misfortune of pronouncing their own format incorrectly.

The vast majority of my favorite authors - ergo the ones I'm interested enough in to go looking for their opinions - have explicitly recused themselves from public interpretation.

It's a lose lose for them. Regardless of the pronunciation they declare will effectively anger half of the fans. Debate on one of my novels on the internet so that people are continuously talking about that novel is a good thing. Why wreck it?

This might be somewhat true for English where there are so many odd spellings and exceptions [1] but, in general, there are rules for pronunciation and they are pretty strong for many languages.

[1]: https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-...

Why on earth would anyone think for a second that the inventor of a technology has any input on the pronunciation of the name of the technology?

Imagine if someone said “well actually the inventor of the paper clip pronounces it with a soft ‘c’ so it sounds like ‘paper slip’”

This seems so clearly absurd that I don’t even really know how to argue against it.

We don't see that logic applied for foreign words. People in the USA rarely say croissant correctly, nor mayonnaise, nor manga, etc... I don't expect it will be any different for created words.

The problem is people aren't going to look up the "correct" pronunciation. They're just going to say it how ever it seems like it would be said by reading it in their native language. Once enough people do it it's too late to fix.

An interesting related thing is how people pronounce initials. For example NOP ("No" "Awp" or "Nawp" or "Nope" I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots".

In my domain, graphics, there's GLSL which some people say "Glisle" and "WGSL" which some call "Wigsle". But why not "Glasle" or "Glashal" and "Wagsle"/"Washal". Why did they choose "i". "a" makes more sense given that the letters stand for and if you're going to abandon what the letters stand for, still, why "i" and not some other vowel?

> I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots".

This has an explanation! If a short vowel is inserted as a transition between two consonants, there is a strong tendency for the inserted sound to be a more ‘neutral’ vowel, such as the schwa /ə/. But in many English dialects, there has been a merger [0] between the schwa /ə/ and the short ‘i’ sound /ɪ/ — the two sounds are no longer distinguishable by native speakers of those dialects. Thus, what might be pronounced as [ɹəts] sounds very much like ‘ritz’, and ‘GLSL’ becomes [ɡləzl̩], sounding like ‘Glisle’.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...

I like how we all know this is impossible to settle and yet wade in with our arguments anyway.

Graphics Interchange Format

Try to say Graphics with a soft G.

Say Graphics with a mouthful of Jif peanut butter and see how it sounds!!!

I think you may have converted me. xD

> Try to say Graphics with a soft G.

That's not exactly difficult to do, though it would be spelled "draphics".

It's difficult to see what this is supposed to be relevant to; acronyms are never given pronunciations taken from their hidden constituent words. Try to say "stimulated" with a /z/ (as in "LASER").

> Try to say "stimulated" with a /z/ (as in "LASER").

Yup, and there are plenty of others too:

SCUBA - U as in uh-nderwater

SIM / VIN - I as in I-dentification

YOLO - second O as in wuh-nce

CAPTCHA - first A as in aw-tomated

AWOL - soft a-bsent

ICE - ih-mmigration and Customs Enforcement

NATO - soft A-tlantic

OCONUS - ow-tside

OSHA - ah-ccupational

SCOTUS / POTUS - uh-f

AIDS - a-cquired

It's really a long list if you look. I vote for GIF with a J sound.

It bothers me a little that all of your examples are vowels. Especially when you include OSHA in the list of examples. It's not the Shafety and Shealth Administration.

One consonant example: CUNY is pronounced with a hard C, but we don't say "New York Kitty"

That's a really good point. It seems like most English consonants have roughly one way to pronounce them, particular as a first letter in a word as in an acronym. I guess I should've looked for acronyms built on Ch, Ph, Sh, Th, Wh, Ph, hard or soft C's, and of course hard or soft G's (ginger, gypsy).

Here's a soft G word making a hard G acronym, and a hard G word making a soft G acronyn:

    GAD - Generalized Anxiety Disorder
    GEMA - Gas and Electric Markets Authority

Some other non-G examples:

    PAL - Phase Alternating Line
    PAWS - Phased Array Warning System
    SWF - ShockWave Flash

They're much harder to find though.

I really don't like any argument for how to pronounce ".gif", so I pronounce it in as many ways as possible to try to annoy people.

Here's a wonderful video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmqy-Sp0txY

there's some leeway in how to pronounce things but obviously communication requires consensus on how to transmit things or else you can't exchange any information. See two people in very different thick accents trying to speak to each other in the same language.

I pronounce it with a guttural "g" as normal in Dutch, and that option is missing :(

Since learning spanish I've pronounced it with a slightly throaty H sound (and GIMP that way also), closer to yours I guess than hard-g gif or jiff.

I for one welcome the giraffe interchange format.

To me it’s gotta be different from “jif” because that’s already a word with a different spelling. I think that’s why there’s a tiebreaker: because “jiff” is already a different word, I jump to “gif”.

Homophones are valid words with valid pronunciations and we have a ton of them in English.

Sure, but I feel like when I encounter a new word, my brain assumes a homophone is less likely than two words having different pronunciations.

How there can be more than two ways to spell words that sound like “to” is just too much. When people do that, I wonder if they’re messing with me or if their minds have fallen prey to a language of many sources. I pray that we will one day have eliminated all of the homophones. Then we will have truly won. Eye think ewe agree…

Well, the creator proposed it to be called "jiff" to specifically reference that word. Because Gifs are compressed, they would download much faster (a jiffy) over slow dialup internet connection than a bmp.

Yes but the creator screwed up in thinking that people were going to read the minutia of their document. The majority of people seeing "gif" with no instruction would use a hard-g. If they know it stands for "Graphics Interchange Format", again they'd use a hard-g. They screwed up (unless their goal was to cause all this endless useless discussion :P)

> The majority of people

Is this true? Basically a lot of people in europe will jump to soft g. Will latin america pronounce "gi" as the aspirated H?. Don't know anything about the countries in africa, I hear nigeria is pretty big and there's a lot of tech coming out of there. India (big elephant, pun intended) I suppose is hard g, but what about china -- I have no clue? Japan (120M, almost half the population of US, mind you) is exclusively soft g -- likely because hard g collides with the name of a prefecture (province). Korea I think is hard g (50 m, almost all very tech-savvy). Indonesia?

Language follows patterns for all sorts of reasons. Some of it has to do with priors based on other words, or beliefs about pronunciation and so forth based on other information, or in many cases, the physiology of the throat, mouth, and tongue. People will do whatever they want and it doesn't matter what the originator of a word wanted or intended.

I don't say this out of disrespect; language is a sort of chaotic dynamic group-level system, and what happens initially is only one small input.

Anyone who says gif must also maintain consistency when saying giraffe. Otherwise, you are living too dangerously for me.

Edit: I think a lot of people thought I was serious. Just joking around.

gin, gift, giraffe, giggle

git

I frequently work with some people in Argentina and they pronounce git as an English speaker might say “jit”

We never discus image formats tho. I’ll have to ask them about GIF next time.

The English call the Thames river Tims. Spanish call Barcelona Barthelona, and Ibiza Ibitha. So I don't put much in native pronounciations. Otherwise, if they are pronouncing it correctly, they need to go back to spelling skool!!

Don't get me started on Stuyvesant! ;-)

/s in case it's not obvious

So how do you pronounce "gill"?

The unit of measure? "Jill".

> The unit of measure?

You wouldn't think "the breathing apparatus of a fish" before "the unit of measure"? When was the last time you saw something measured in gills?

When I lived in Scotland around 25 years ago, many bars in the Highlands advertised the size of their whiskey measures in terms of gills (and I was laughed at for mispronouncing the term!). I'm not sure if it's still common. So for me, it does actually come to mind at least as readily as fish anatomy.

Jill, obviously. /s

There is no sense in which English pronunciation can be described as "consistent." As supporting evidence, may I introduce the poem "The Chaos":

https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

As a non-native speaker who mostly reads English, this makes me very worried about my pronunciation.

The P in JPEG stands for "photo." You don't pronounce it "jpheg." English isn't a consistent language, and to try to apply consistent pronunciation is a failure in abstract thinking.

You've made a giant gaffe.

I know you were joking. My favorite example is

   ghoti

"gh" from laugh, "o" from "women", "ti" from "tion" (like nation")

so "ghoti" can be pronounced the same as "fish"

I will go ahead and note that such a construction violates a ton of pronunciation rules. Yes english has those.

There ought to be a 'law' (like Godwin's) that shuts down any debate about pronunciation if it devolves into mentioning the GIF file format.

We're all used to the idea that the creator of a thing can be wrong about the thing at this point. Wizard poop and all.

Pay respect to the author and also to people who use the word and want easy pronunciations so they can spend more time on what's more useful. If, say, our lovely Indian instructors on youtube decide that gif is git but with f, then let it be, for that they are making contributions.

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