The sticking point seems to be that while there are a lot more words with the soft g in the english lexicon, some of the most commonly used words have a hard g, such as give, girl, begin and gift. Like weights on a scale, a smaller weight can balance when it’s closer to the fulcrum. The linguist Gretchen McCulloch on GIF.
Fine–I’ll take the gift girl.
(Also, I’ll pronounce GIF with a hard “g.”)
Jeez, is it that hard to pronounce a made-up word the way the inventor asks? It’s not an unreasonable pronunciation, it’s like “gin” with an “f”. The whole “choosy programmers” deal. It was supposed to be amusing, which breaks down if you use a hard “g”.
Likewise it’s only proper pronouncing “Linux” as “Leenooks”. Torwalds invented it and named it after himself. What’s not to like?
A declaration he made 26 years after inventing it? That barn is long since dehorsed.
If I’m dealing with a techie I usually just call it a G.I.F. file to keep from getting sidetracked.
I never liked wording acronyms anyway.
‘made-up word’ is redundant and clearly, yes. Most people don’t know and don’t care what Wilhite thinks about their pronunciation.
And the inventor of lawn tennis wanted to call it “sphairistikè”.
Both of which proves that the inventor of a thing has absolutely no business naming it.
Actually, Torvalds early on specified two pronunciations. One based on the Finnish pronunciation of his name and one based on the Western pronunciation. There used to be a pronunciation section in the Linux FAQ with links to two sound files he created stored at UWasa. It’s just “Linus” with an “ecks” folks.
But a third, bizarre, pronunciation took over and all that went into the memory hole.
Airport code or contraceptive device?
IAD - Dulles Airport
IUD - contraceptive device
You sure that’s not a guerilla-style explosive?
I personally don’t. As I’ve said twice, “jiff” was the original pronunciation I used, back in the late 80s/early 90s when the format started taking off, but I’ve found I needed to shift to “ghiff” in the mid-90s as that’s what everyone around me said.
But if you do want some kind of a citation, here’s a 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survery with 50K+ responses:
65.6% say it with the “g” in “gift.”
26.3% say it like “jiff.”
6.% say it as “G. I. F.”
2% other
It also matters by country. If you live in a Francophone nation, you’re likely to pronounce it as “jiff.”
ETA: And here’s another survey from 2014 with similar results. 70:30 in favor of “ghiff” vs “jiff.”
Oh yeah, nothing better than a humorous animated throatwarblermangrove file.
I use the “gift” pronunciation, but I’m happy to fight it out in the marketplace with the “gin” folk. We don’t need any appeals to authority on this one. It’s fine for a word to have two or more common pronunciations.
At least we don’t have that problem with jape eggs.
I think it looks more like “genuflect” with an “i” instead of a “enu” and then a “lect” tacked on at the end. That should clear things up.
How would Pete Buttigieg say it?
They’re the ones who don’t like confrontation and just make the first letter silent.
The p in jpeg stands for photographic. So why aren’t people arguing that it should be pronounced jay-feg?
It’s actually DGIF. The D is silent.