"Jif" is the original pronunciation. It is a pun, a play on the word "jif" short for "jiffy" meaning a short amount of time, as in "I'll send it to you in a gif". The newer pronunciation has become popular based on the fallacious reasoning that an acronym should be pronounced the same as its constituent words, which isn't a thing at all.
Language evolves, and both pronunciations are common enough to be considered acceptable. The only way to be wrong about how to pronounce the word is to claim one of the pronunciations is wrong.
Become popular? It's been popular roughly for the lifespan of the format. It's hardly language's fault the developer wanted to make an unfunny reference to a since forgotten peanut butter slogan.
On the other hand linguistics indicate a hard g sound with the construction of the word, constituent words aside. Plenty of four letter words starting with the gi combo have a hard g, including but not limited to gift which you may notice is very similarly constructed.
Whatever else the English language may throw at us, people appreciate consistency because we can make some sense of the world. A hard g is the consistent, predictable, sensible choice for the limited availability of those virtues English offers.
The newer pronunciation has become popular based on
The newer pronunciation has become popular based on their internalization of the obscure patterns of English pronunciation, informed by the most similar word: "gift" which uses a hard g. Everyone I know of started saying it with a hard g because that's what made sense based on the spelling, long before hearing the weird thing about constituent words.
Nobody pronounced LASER as Lah-seer, which you'd have to do if you used "A as in Amplification" an "E as in Emission".
havent been on there but from a quick glance looks to be a lively discussion on our beloved moving image standard.
shameless plug: we also have a lovely knot making community.
It's pronounced Gif, with a soft G as in Graphics.
I don't give a fuck what the idiot creator thinks it should be pronounced as, I'll die on this hill with my honor intact, surrounded by the corpses of everyone who thinks Jif is referring to anything but peanut butter.
It's pronounced GIF (sounding out each letter), like in that 'If Google Was A Guy' CollegeHumor video. Just so that it doesn't annoy or antagonise anyone for a meaningless purpose. Everyone wins.
Or, maybe both pronouncers (the "jiff" gang and the "giff" crowd) will team up against me for saying that. At least we'll have harmony for most people if that's the case, and I'll be a sacrifice to keep the peace.
Also, "gi" in english makes the hard g sound very often, like in gift, or give, or giddy. You need to do some real mental gymnastics to justify it as a j sound
looks like a lot of palatal affricates to me dawg idk, i think you're the one doing mental gymnastics trying to justify it not being pronounced the way the creator specified. "gif" the way you ask for just sounds weird
it's an acronym (as opposed to initialisms, which are not pronounced as a single word). There is no rule on pronunciation.
scuba
nato
laser
We don't do this for any other acronym. There is no rule about the pronunciation. It's arbitrary. The creator chose "jif", so that's the "canonical" one.
I think that words have meaning. And the meaning can be true, but pronunciation is not part of the true part. It is only the color of the arrow pointing at truth.
I pronounce oil differently than my cousin in Texas, and I pronounce car differently than my uncle in New Jersey. And to use pre-Modern English (~1500) era spelling ideas we would spell those words differently and probably use different alphabets. And spelling became a standard thing in English around 1750 when Johnson's dictionary became so celebrated and a primary reference.
So there is slippage in spelling and pronunciation.
We should just go ahead and pronounce all acronyms the way their unabbreviated forms’ first syllable letters are said. Just ignore we treat individual letters differently than the words they came from.
The CIA should sound like “see ya”
Department of Transportation “Duht”
Internal Revenue Service “ears”
It wasn’t a real suggestion. A bit of hyperbole and exaggeration due to the pointless debate over jig/gif. We have a long precedent of pronouncing acronyms as initialisms and not enunciating the letters as they were pronounced in their original word. While I think the original argument over jif/gif was for fun, some can’t let it go.
All this could be solved if people would accept that English changes over time and if defined by usage and understanding.
If people easily understand what I mean when I say gif then I have pronounced it correctly. Same as if people understand what I mean if I use "literally" to mean "figuratively" or spell "island" with an 's' despite it having no Latin roots.
All of this could be solved if people actually cared about finding a reasonable solution. We don’t fight about it because it’s worth fighting over. We fight because it’s in our blood. We must fight to satisfy our primal urge for conflict.
So take up your keyboard, mouse, phone, or any other weapon that suits you. Join me in the battle of “gif vs gif”, and may the best warrior find victory.
But they don't easily understand you. You're being deliberately lazy and shifting the onus of putting mental work into the conversation onto your conversational partner. Now they have to work extra-hard to deciphwr your gibberish. The decent, respectful thing to do is treat them as an equal, and put an equal amount of effort into achieving communication.
Or I could just tell you to flarfle your garglax. Seems perfectly clear to me, so obviously you're in the wrong if you complain.
It isn't really used to mean figuratively though. It's used as an intensifier, and all of its synonyms are as well. And they all have been for hundreds of years. Really, truly, honestly, actually, etc. Seems so strange to me that this is the single word from the group that gets dogpiled on, and the perception that it's some new phenomenon, Mark Twain used it in the same manner.
I'll tell the agile fragile fugitive gin-drinking giraffes eating ginger ginseng to imagine gingerly using their digits to engineer a geological survey of the gist of your comment. They ate too much gingerbread and now have gingivitis, so the margins of those attracted to religion aren't as rigid as the original origins of those of that region and we have to remain vigilant lest magic supersede logic, which of course would be terrible for legislation of the legions.
Great.
However none of those have the g-i-f sequence and have the j sound.
They do have g-i-t sequences. So it suggests that the f makes the g pronounced like a g not a j.
Intact, you could use examples like "digit" to argue the versioning software should be pronounced jit.
Gin like Gin and Tonic. Use Gin instead next time. Don't get me wrong I will forever call it gif(t) however to help you with your position using a 3 letter word may help.
You may be explaining how superficial the Gift argument is by making it a much longer thing to take off but figured if you ever use it in a real way or argument you may want this one in your back pocket as well.
It's interesting debate to observe from my perspective as my native tongue has no different pronunciations for letters, they are always the same regardless of their placement in words. G is always pronounced the same, and so is P. (Spoiler: it's hard G and hard P).
This brought another thing in my mind about soft G. Let's take for example Gin, which is with soft G I believe (it's hard G here because there is only hard G). Then there is the acronym GT for Gin & Tonic. The question is, in English language countries, is the acronym pronounced jay-T instead of gee-T?
All English is based on etymology which is why it's such a hard language to learn. Looking at how a word is spelled always takes second place to where it comes from.
GIF was pronounced with soft g since it came out, back in the 80s/90s when it was shared on AOL and CompuServe. Year, decades, later it came back into social media with Reddit and Twitter, and people pronounced it based on what it looked like it would sound like, which is most similar to hard g like gift.
That doesn't mean GIF never had a soft g. It just shows how old you are or when you discovered it when you use the hard g.
Looking at how a word is spelled always takes second place to where it comes from.
Where it comes from matters less than historic pronunciations.
"Lawn-jer-ay" is how most of the English word pronounces "lingerie" even though that's nothing like how it's pronounced in French, nor is it anything like what you'd pronounce if you sounded out those letters assuming it was an English word.
"Lieutenant" is pronounced completely differently in the UK vs the US. It's etymology is also French, but neither English pronunciation is at all close to the French. Somehow the British get an "f" sound in there, which can't be explained by spelling or etymology, and somehow the American pronunciation turns "ieu" into an "oo" sound.
As for "gif", the "aol and compuserve" thing shows the problem: text based forums. The first time people encountered the word was by reading it. As an unfamiliar word, they mostly went with the common English rule of finding similar words. In this case, the only other words with "gif" are "gift" and words based on "gift". Since that has a hard G, from the very start people have been using the hard "G" sound.
It's basically the same with English always using a hard G for native English words. The complication comes from the fact that English preserves the pronunciation and spelling of loan words and loan words make up something like half of all words in English. The vast majority of words in English that use a soft G are French or Latin loan words, with a few Greek words that had their pronunciation latinized.
English preserves the pronunciation and spelling of loan words
English doesn't preserve the pronunciation. It approximates the pronunciation while keeping the spelling, and that pronunciation drifts over time and changes in different places. See: Lieutenant, a word that has two wildly different pronunciations in English, neither of which sound anything like the original French word.
Take the word "gift". Say the word, but stop before you get to the last letter. What letters did you say? What sound came out of your mouth? Case closed.
Take the word “applet”. Say the word, but stop before you get to the last letter. What letters did you say? What sound came out of your mouth? Case closed.