canon
It’s pronounced sanon btw
From the original çanon of course
It’s pronounced source.
You mean the Sanon the Dork Lard?
Jandalf, yes I was once called that. Jandalf the Jray.
Now I am Jandalf the Hwhite.
After smearing myself with chool hwip
Why do you keep saying it like that?!
My giant giraffe agrees.
If you’re still unconvinced, say “G”
The letter starts with the J sound.
Checkmate atheists.
I may sound haughty and knowledgable when I say JiF then, but between just you and me, I didn’t know a damn thing about this and just decided to say it this way in my brain for reasons that remain unclear.
Me too. I just always said it with a soft G because my brain told me that’s how it was pronounced.
Strange that I never got a notification for this. Hm.
I’ve always pronounced it that way for whatever reason, and when I learned that was the correct way I was very high and mighty, lol
Yes but actually no
Oh yeah? Well lick my gargantuan gorilla gonads.
(I’m actually team jif but can’t help myself)
Was it a gift?
Yeah, from a gyrating genie named George.
Jorge wants to have a word with you.
What does horhay want?
“Hiff”
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Good god Gordon go gag a gator
Oooh, that’s how grammar works in English language? Okay, so me as a developer of some obscure thing from this point forward are instructing everyone to pronounce “home” as “hume”, since that’s how you pronounce “o” in “tomb”. I decided that solely because my software is loosely related to the meaning of the word. K thx bai.
Did you invent the word home? No? So you don’t get to decide how to pronounce it.
Neither did the author of graphic format. GIF is not a word, but initialism, like NSA, FBI, NASA, IBM, etc. And there are specific rules how they are read and pronounced.
NASA is an acronym, not an initialism. And guess how the last letter of NASA is pronounced versus how the A in the corresponding word is pronounced. Ah vs Uh.
Irrelevant comment to the discussion at hand as the matter is not set in stone in English language. More to the point it doesn’t change the fact how GIF is pronounced. Even if you consider it an acronym it’s still a form of abbreviation and not a word on its own with known heritage, hence the general rules on how to pronounce letter
g
do not apply.Had the word originate from French part of the English dictionary (like gin, giraffe, etc.) then
g
is pronounced asj
before vowelse
andi
and would make sense. But Germanic words (such as gift, geese) still use hardg
. So applying normal rules is pointless, since English has no such thing.In short, it’s pronounced whatever the way people pronounce it. End of story.
O.k.
Wait till you hear about ghoti…
Haha, good one!
technically starts with the D sound
Now you’re just getting crazy
I always think all the arguments are ridiculous because it’s essentially saying that someone is pronouncing a product (not a word) that they created incorrectly. This product even has a catchphrase for it. There’s literally nothing you can say to contradict that. It’s a product with a catchphrase that describes how to pronounce it. If you pronounce it differently then you do you, but you are wrong.
It’s also pretty funny when it’s about actual product you will get corrected to the intended pronunciation, or at least, allowed because people acknowledge there might be multiple way of reading a word based on where you from. Like potato and tomato.
One thing I learned recently is that if GIF shall be pronounced “GIF” like the G in Graphical, JPEG shall be pronounced “JFEG” like the P in Photography
Just droppin that in
Do I look like I know what a JFEG is?
I just want a picture of a gosh dang JFEGdog
J’feg
Fuck this, double standards ftw
Is it pronounced jilf then as well?
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My name is jgef
If it was JPhEG sure.
Would be the worst retroactive devaluation of a body of literary work since JK Rowling showed the world how she really is.
Orson Scott Card’s gotta rank up there, too.
True
I really don’t think JK Rowling revealed who she really was. I think she demonstrated what too much money does to someone.
Nah, you become overconfident, callous and indifferent to the suffering of others from amassing extreme wealth.
Bigotry and pretending to be the victim of those you victimize is income-agnostic.
Good point. I guess it’s a case of “a little of column A and a little of column B.”
You can tell that’s fine art because it says it is.
Picasso did the same thing.
Jicasso?
No, Picasso, pronounced Pizza-so.
I read that as “Yan-dolf”.
I am not even making this up.
OK you fancy Dutch dude. What’re ya gonna do now? Brag about bicycles and socialized medicine?!!! (He says, jealous af)
You mean yealous
It’s clearly laurel-dolf
Nah, the "a"s are silent.
Yandalf
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The great Anglo-Saxon wizard, Ġandalf
The creator of the GIF format says it’s pronounced like Jiff, like the peanut butter.
He’s wrong, even though he created the format.
I went looking for it, and apparently you’re right. He said “Jif”. He’s either trolling or being obstinate. People don’t see it that way, especially seeing as it’s the hard “G” from “Graphical” in the initialism. So he’s applying a pronunciation rule of soft G when followed with “i” when used in a word to an initialism - and acronyms aren’t words (noted: they can become treated as such).
GIF is not a word. So soft “g” when followed by “i” does not apply.
E: corrected to initialism, and now we have to debate if an initialism pronounced as an acronym should obey the soft G rule, or if it should be an exception. Exceptions do exist, so the soft G is not a hard rule.
Acronyms are words. They’re words formed out of the initial letters of a phrase or name.
I went and looked it up.
Acronym is the most correct term. GIF can be an initialism or an acronym, however it becomes an acronym when we pronounce it as a word.
I’m not going to get into a debate over it obeying word rules when it starts as an initialism. That’s for scholars and asklemmy shenanigans.
The funny thing is that even though there are people on both sides dead set they are right, if they hear someone say the opposite pronunciation they still understand what the speaker is referring to. So there’s absolutely no context lost, it’s just preference, and I have a feeling given the age of the name GIF those preferences are very regional, as the internet had not become a national/international thing yet.
There is no such thing as a “hard g” or a “soft g”. There is a g sound, and there is a j sound.
Yes, I will die on this hill.
How do you pronounce bridge or baggage?
Brij
Baggaj
Yeah, a soft g is kinda just a j
With J sounds, of course.
Bajjaj
It’s almost like there is no rule when pronouncing acronyms and people choose to pronounce them however sounds best to them. How do you pronounce the U in SCUBA? How do you pronounce the two As in NASA? The A in BASE jumping? The O in POG juice? The O in SONAR? The I in SIM card? The A in LASER? None of those are pronounced like the composite letters, so why is GIF so rigid?
It isn’t rigid.
The soft G with the following i is common. There are exceptions to that rule, so it really isn’t always a rule.
Also, GIF is an initialism, and an initialism pronounced as a word becomes an acronym. I really don’t want to debate whether an acronym has to obey “real” word rules.
That’s dumb, It’s “Graphics Interchange Format.”
How do you pronounce the U in SCUBA? How do you pronounce the two As in NASA? The A in BASE jumping? The O in POG juice? The O in SONAR? The I in SIM card? The A in LASER?
“Sauron’s eye was supposed to be a gigantic vagina”
Sauron’s whispering eye.
Sauron’s vag
What if he was evil because he wasn’t getting any and his best attempt at making a medieval fleshlight kinda backfired.
One demussy to rule them all
comes back
Bilbo is gay!
dies
comes back
Nazgul are just men in dresses!
not canceled cause that’s true
Sauron actually do shit but he’s so powerful the shit disintegrated when it comes out.
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Anyone who uses the argument that Graphical is pronounced with a hard G sound needs to think about how they pronounce other acronyms, like SCUBA, NASA, LASER, SONAR, POG, SIM… the list goes on.
I do say N(ay)SA to annoy people.
It’s flattering that you think anybody knows what all of those acronyms actually stand for. I’m semi-certain of NASA, the rest could just be made up for all I know (as a non-native English speaker).
Kinda hard to forget SCUBA. Self contained underwater breathing apparatus
And Elrond is Hispanic elf
All letters before A are silent.
Dango Unchained
Ah yes, my favorite movie
Gneiss!
Aragorn: You have my sword.
Legolas: And you have my bow.
Gimli: And my HAX.
I love Lejolas and Jimli’s gokes.
So his name was always Jim
LF?
Guess we need to remake the trilogy.
Hollywood’s probably working on that anyway.
They wouldn’t dare…
You don’t know Hollywood very well.
Maybe this time they can put in some GOD DAMN TOM BOMBADIL
You sit the FUCK BACK DOWN, BOMBADIL! You won a Tolkien sweepstakes and got name dropped in the book, that’s all!!!
It will have 1 hour 30 minutes of Sam Merry and Pippin argue about potaeto and potahtoe. And Sauron will spend his time mentioning all the genders and races and gods can’t kill him while he got stabbed in his face.