I think there’s a wider point to make here: when a word spreads in written form across the boundaries between living speech communities, its pronunciation often falls into the ditch (er, not what ditch means in Ireland, I know) and drowns.
Thank you, Stan your articles always make me smile. Two things delight me: that this issue exists that we care about it. (Pun intended.) I worked for a high-tech startup when GIFs came on the scene, and I have never heard anyone use jif or the acronym pronounced letter by letter it was always GIF with a hard G. Having an engineer dad who was also an American Indian and the first generation of his family not to speak the Lushootseed-plus-English of his dad’s generation, or the Anishinaabemowin-plus-English of his mom’s generation, and an English teacher and librarian mom of French Canadian, German, and Irish descent, made me an interpreter between two cultures from childhood, so I find this subject natively interesting in more ways than one. The differences in the jargon necessary to be au courant in each place were endlessly entertaining. I went from the English Literature department at UC Berkeley to the AI Lab at the Stanford Research Institute.
Choosy programmers choose gif free#
Out of curiosity, how do you pronounce GIF? Feel free to vote in this poll or to add your thoughts below. Communication is roomy enough to contain such discrepancies, and if confusion arises people are smart and imaginative enough to figure it out. Millions of people pronounce schedule with a sh– sound other millions go with sk. A continued split would not be a problem.
Soft- g GIF may gradually fade, or it may retain minor currency. There is more than one right way – there often is – and declaring otherwise doesn’t make it otherwise. The g‘s origin in graphics is another factor in its favour.īut there’s no question both are acceptable: Oxford Dictionaries sanction both, as do Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary, each of them based on extensive data of what people say. But there aren’t many gif- words apart from gift, so it’s not surprising either that hard- g GIF predominates. We have hard- g gift, gills, giddy, give and giggles, soft- g gin, giblets, Gilly, giant and gist.* (There’s a Scandinavian flavour to the hard- g set.) So it’s not surprising the pronunciation of a new gi- term would split this way. Gi– is inherently ambiguous, pronunciation-wise. Pronunciation develops through general agreement – it’s up to everyone who uses the term – and most people seem to prefer hard- g GIF. But this presumes a non-existent authority: the creators don’t get to lay down a planet-wide law, nor does anyone on their behalf. They say it’s “up to the creators”, and “jif” is what the format’s inventors indicated. Some people insist on soft- g GIF, as in “jif”. Or you can say the letters: “gee eye eff”.
The short answer is that both /gɪf/ and /dʒɪf/ are fine – you can say GIF with the hard g of gift or the soft g of gin.
When Oxford Dictionaries named the acronym GIF (graphics interchange format) as their US word of the year (in its verb use), debates resurfaced over its correct pronunciation.
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