“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.
There exists other words that start with gi but use the soft g, gin for example. But regardless, the pronunciation of one word is not determined by the pronunciation of other unrelated words.
I’ve been saying gif with a soft g for over twenty years. Telling me not to is what makes English worse. As far I’m concerned both pronunciations are valid.
In your opinion. “Jiggawatt” is not a common English pronunciation outside of back to the future references at this point. People mostly settled on one over the other because it makes sense to pronounce a word a similar way to be more easily understood. It’s not always the case, sure, but I think you’ll find multiple pronunciations are the exception, not the rule. That’s why you can come up with a good handful of such words, but you’ll be using words with single pronunciations to talk about them.
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”.
OK but there are other similar words that start with gi like giraffe and gigolo, but really that’s not why I or anyone I knew in the 90s started using the soft g to say “gif.” We did so because we learned about the format, and said “Neat, what’s it called?” and they said “it’s called a gif” because that was the name of the format. We didn’t debate the pronunciation because it had been given a name, the same way you don’t ask a person you just met “Shouldn’t ‘Bob’ be pronounced with a long ‘o’ like the very similar name ‘Job’? I’m going to call you ‘Bobe’ because that makes more sense to me.” You’d have to be a massive douche to say that out loud to a person who had just introduced themselves.
If someone said it with the hard “g” we just nodded and went about our day because it doesn’t matter, we knew what they probably meant and they just hadn’t read the manual.
Pronunciations change over time, and that’s good. Language is a function of communication, and better communication is what enabled humans to transfer knowledge. If someone uses the soft g, you know the word they’re saying, and I know you’re probably not saying the word “gift” from context. We’re communicating either way, and we don’t have to pronounce every word the same.
Case in point, I don’t say “emission” with a long “e” sound, I say “ehmission” because it doesn’t matter that much.
The only way to be wrong is to claim that someone else is saying it wrong.
“Neat, what’s it called?” and they said “it’s called a gif”
Yeah, and then we all assumed it was pronounced “gif” not “jif” because the only other word with the letters “gif” was “gift” and that had a hard g. Later on, someone claimed it was supposed to be pronounced “jif”, but we all laughed at that idea and kept using the correct pronunciation.
We didn’t debate the pronunciation because it had been given a name
Neither did we, it was a hard g. There was no debate. Sure, some people claimed it was supposed to be a soft g, but we all laughed at that idea because it was ridiculous.
We didn’t debate the pronunciation because it had been given a name, the same way you don’t ask a person you just met “Shouldn’t ‘Bob’ be pronounced with a long ‘o’ like the very similar name ‘Job’?
I’m guessing you’re not multilingual then, because I am, and it’s extremely common to change how someone’s name is pronounced. People with the name “David” who are French are used to the French pronunciation of their name being “Dah-veed” but in English “Day-vid”. French people pronounce “Bob” as “Bub”. It’s good to allow people to slightly change how your name is pronounced because it flows better in their language. If they have to pause every time your name comes up to adapt how it’s said, it just makes things more difficult.
As for “gif”, if someone pronounced it as “jif”, we giggled a bit, but that’s it. It was only if someone was really insistent that it had to be a soft g that we really laughed. Some people tried to claim that the creator of the format had wanted a certain pronunciation, but we knew that didn’t matter.
Language is a function of communication, and better communication is what enabled humans to transfer knowledge
Exactly, and part of good communication is good pronunciation, because if you mispronounce things it makes it harder for people to understand you. If you insist on using a nonsensical pronunciation then you’re just trying to make it hard to communicate with you.
That is the most anti-linguistic take ever lmao. There is no such thing as an objectively correct pronunciation, both pronunciations of “gif” are valid in the context of most English conversations.
On another note, the guy who created it said it’s pronounced /dʒɪf/, so if any pronunciation is more “correct” it’s the one you hate. It’s not “some people tried to claim”, that’s what it actually is “correctly” pronounced like according to the only one that can come close to being considered an authority on what the correct pronunciation is.
Your comment being so pretentious and stuck-up about you not liking a pronunciation leads me to believe you’re making the whole “we” thing up, and instead of a group of people being dumbasses and laughing at a correct pronunciation, it was just one person (you) malding about it in their head. Because being the kind of person to actually laugh at something like that in real life, face to face, would be too embarrassing for anyone to actually go through with it. God even just reading your comment makes me feel like I’m looking at made-up Reddit stories again…
Also how people speaking other languages handle names doesn’t have anything to do with this, there’s a big difference between calling someone “wrong” for pronouncing a loanword differently than in the parent language because of the languages’ phonetics & phonotactics not aligning with each other, and insisting that everyone else is “wrong” because their completely linguistically valid, common pronunciation challenges your understanding of the language.
Oxford uses /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation with /gif/ as the secondary in most of their resources (although a lot don’t specify a primary or secondary), Dictionary.com lists /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation, some like Merriam-Webster list both equally, Cambridge less consistent but list both. Clearly the people who’s job is language disagree with you, even if you don’t want to ask for linguists to tell you, they literally make the language references you use. If you want to be stubborn and insist on being wrong, so be it.
You can now continue malding about the fact that you use the incorrect pronunciation for the rest of your life, since apparently that’s how you see language.
There is no such thing as an objectively correct pronunciation
But, there are patterns to the language and using a soft “g” sound doesn’t follow those patterns, so it’s objectively a less correct pronunciation.
the guy who created it
Who cares about that guy? He made a mistake, he should have looked up how words are pronounced before trying to get people to mispronounce “gif”. If he’d said it was supposed to be pronounced “dug” people would have just ignored him, but his attempt wasn’t that absurd, it was just slightly wrong, so not everyone ignored him the way they should have.
instead of a group of people being dumbasses and laughing at a correct pronunciation
It really sounds like you didn’t have friends. The rest of us did.
Also how people speaking other languages handle names doesn’t have anything to do with this
Of course it does. How you pronounce things depends on the language you use. How people pronounce the letters “gif” is based on their language. In English, it’s a hard g.
But, there are patterns to the language and using a soft “g” sound doesn’t follow those patterns, so it’s objectively a less correct pronunciation.
Who makes these mystical “rules” that English surely follows? And who says the patterns you see are objectively more correct, there are a ton of other words with “g”/“gi” that pronounce it with a /dʒ/, you have to do some real mental gymnastics to justify one of them being more correct. There is a point where you have to paint a massively arbitrary line to which patterns are more “correct”, it is a completely subjective matter.
Who cares about that guy?
He’s the only one that can be considered an authority on how the word is pronounced LMAO.
He made a mistake, he should have looked up how words are pronounced before trying to get people to mispronounce “gif”.
Pronunciation isn’t based on spelling, it’s the other way around. Writing is a tool made to accomodate language, and said writing isn’t a pronunciation guide. You’re lobotomized if you think otherwise, especially in English. But regardless, see below.
If he’d said it was supposed to be pronounced “dug” people would have just ignored him, but his attempt wasn’t that absurd, it was just slightly wrong, so not everyone ignored him the way they should have.
But he didn’t pronounce it like “dug”. He pronounced it consistently with another common 3-letter word “gin”. Is “gin” wrong now? You can cope with being wrong all you want, but it doesn’t make you less wrong.
It really sounds like you didn’t have friends. The rest of us did.
Yeah no that writing reads like a fake Reddit story, I refuse to believe even the dumbest teenagers would act like that.
Of course it does. How you pronounce things depends on the language you use. How people pronounce the letters “gif” is based on their language. In English, it’s a hard g.
The English writing system isn’t the English language, and the English writing system isn’t consistent enough to make estimations for a pronunciation like that. The only two words in the language that contain “gif” are “gift” and “fungiform”, plus derivatives of course, the latter of which is generally, by standard, pronounced with a /dʒ/ sound. If you think that’s enough basis to go off of to make rules for every other word containing “gif”, and then insist that your pronunciation is “correct”, that’s a you problem.
The same goes for any language – German has mostly-consistent generalized spelling conventions for the language that approximate pronunciation, but a LOT of common words break this convention, including “guken”, “orange”, the ending “-ig”, “toilette”, “vase”, etc. which are pronounced differently than their spelling would lead you to believe. In fact it is most common for Fremdwörter & Lehnwörter to not be spelled typically. Is every German speaker pronouncing those words wrong now? What about Italian languages, which often do the same thing but significantly more? You can look at less and less standardized languages that contain more and more irregularities, until you get to a language like English and see that the “irregularities” in the writing system completely outweigh any actual “regularities” you see and it becomes completely pointless to try to enforce a pronunciation based on a certain spelling. It’s why people learning a language like English or Tibetan or even Danish will have often cite the spelling as an extreme pain point (I can corroborate the first based on my experience teaching ESL), it is an inconsistent orthography where the spelling is almost entirely dependent on the etymology or something else, rather than any current pronunciation.
It’s also convenient how you left out the entire part about the dictionaries. Almost as if that was a silver bullet for your flawed argument and you can’t acknowledge it because it would make you look too crazy. Because the people who are the most looked up on for “correct” language by most English speakers say you’re wrong. Hmmm.
When you consider that a large number of words in English which are spelled the same have different pronunciations or are pronounced wildly phonemically differently by different speakers or in different dialects, like “minute”, “combat”, “perfect”, “read”, “bass”, “close”, “agape”, “object”, “sewer”, “wind”, “wound”… “apricot”, “leisure”, “often”, “crayon”, “either”, “been”, “caramel”, “garage”, “yogurt”… your argument about pronunciation based on “spelling rules” falls apart pretty quickly.
Present your argument on how English works to any linguists or even anyone who has basic knowledge of linguistics and you’ll be laughed out of the room.
He’s the only one that can be considered an authority on how the word is pronounced LMAO.
He’s just the guy who invented the software and coined a name for it, he has no authority over how that should be pronounced. If he came up with a ridiculous pronunciation (as he did) he should be laughed at and people should use a sensible pronunciation.
Pronunciation isn’t based on spelling
Of course it is. That’s how spelling works. In English it isn’t nearly 1:1 like other languages, but spelling is very strongly tied to how a word is pronounced.
the English writing system isn’t consistent enough to make estimations for a pronunciation like that
Yes, it is. That’s why people pronounce it with a hard “g”, because they’ve internalized the rules for spelling vs. pronunciation in English and know that those 3 letters in that order has a hard g.
are pronounced wildly phonemically differently
There are slight differences in pronunciation, not wild differences. The differences are so slight that normally you can understand the word someone is using in another dialect without difficulty. And, in every English dialect “gift” has a hard g, as does “gif”.
Somehow, I can tolerate “jpheg” much easier than the forsaken “jif.”
Jif is where it’s at. Peanut butter and image format? Yes please
But Jif in Australia is a cleaning solution - can we have different pronunciations based on country?
No need, it’s Gif. Heathens be damned.
Y’all love diminutives, call them jiffies?
Jiffy is already an abstract measurement of time though
Fits perfectly.
Jiffy is the average length of a gif.
Give me about four jiffies, I’ve just got to finish wiping my ass
Sounds more than fair. We can’t agree to a person on our sounds anyway.
No. You cannot.
The creators literally referenced this early on “choosy devs choose gif” like the jiff peanut butter commercial.
this goes deeper than I thought!
Yes, and that’s stupid.
It’s not ‘Jraphical Image Format’. Gah!!!
deleted by creator
/skəba/ (sk•uh•bah), obviously.
Oh my God no one fucking cares about Steve Wilhite and his fucking speech impediment.
You seem upset.
That’s a lot of peanut butter
You don’t pronounce the word for imagery as “jrafics?” How odd.
Giraffics
Stupid long horses
By that standard, the comic is right and we should say j-feg
Do you also pronounce origin like Oregon
“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.
There exists other words that start with gi but use the soft g, gin for example. But regardless, the pronunciation of one word is not determined by the pronunciation of other unrelated words.
In English? Yes. In other, more structured and sane languages? No.
Jift.
Yep. Jiffy is only used for peanut butter. Great point!
You can find plenty of places where the claim is that it’s a soft g because “choosey devs choose gif”.
Where jiffy is used is irrelevant in that case.
It’s been popular in use but casual everyday people weren’t always bringing them up in conversation.
English is not consistent, accept that. You can say gif but I’ll continue to call it gif.
This is the real answer. Both are correct and that’s that. It can be gif as in image, or gif as in graphic.
That doesn’t mean we have an ehxcuse to haje jt worse
I’ve been saying gif with a soft g for over twenty years. Telling me not to is what makes English worse. As far I’m concerned both pronunciations are valid.
In your opinion. “Jiggawatt” is not a common English pronunciation outside of back to the future references at this point. People mostly settled on one over the other because it makes sense to pronounce a word a similar way to be more easily understood. It’s not always the case, sure, but I think you’ll find multiple pronunciations are the exception, not the rule. That’s why you can come up with a good handful of such words, but you’ll be using words with single pronunciations to talk about them.
It’s Gif and I don’t care what anyone says
I don’t care either. Now excuse me while I go gerk off.
Dijusting.
The approximately equal amount of upvotes and downvotes this comment received pretty much sums up the entire gif wars.
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”.
OK but there are other similar words that start with gi like giraffe and gigolo, but really that’s not why I or anyone I knew in the 90s started using the soft g to say “gif.” We did so because we learned about the format, and said “Neat, what’s it called?” and they said “it’s called a gif” because that was the name of the format. We didn’t debate the pronunciation because it had been given a name, the same way you don’t ask a person you just met “Shouldn’t ‘Bob’ be pronounced with a long ‘o’ like the very similar name ‘Job’? I’m going to call you ‘Bobe’ because that makes more sense to me.” You’d have to be a massive douche to say that out loud to a person who had just introduced themselves.
If someone said it with the hard “g” we just nodded and went about our day because it doesn’t matter, we knew what they probably meant and they just hadn’t read the manual.
Pronunciations change over time, and that’s good. Language is a function of communication, and better communication is what enabled humans to transfer knowledge. If someone uses the soft g, you know the word they’re saying, and I know you’re probably not saying the word “gift” from context. We’re communicating either way, and we don’t have to pronounce every word the same.
Case in point, I don’t say “emission” with a long “e” sound, I say “ehmission” because it doesn’t matter that much.
The only way to be wrong is to claim that someone else is saying it wrong.
Yeah, and then we all assumed it was pronounced “gif” not “jif” because the only other word with the letters “gif” was “gift” and that had a hard g. Later on, someone claimed it was supposed to be pronounced “jif”, but we all laughed at that idea and kept using the correct pronunciation.
Neither did we, it was a hard g. There was no debate. Sure, some people claimed it was supposed to be a soft g, but we all laughed at that idea because it was ridiculous.
I’m guessing you’re not multilingual then, because I am, and it’s extremely common to change how someone’s name is pronounced. People with the name “David” who are French are used to the French pronunciation of their name being “Dah-veed” but in English “Day-vid”. French people pronounce “Bob” as “Bub”. It’s good to allow people to slightly change how your name is pronounced because it flows better in their language. If they have to pause every time your name comes up to adapt how it’s said, it just makes things more difficult.
As for “gif”, if someone pronounced it as “jif”, we giggled a bit, but that’s it. It was only if someone was really insistent that it had to be a soft g that we really laughed. Some people tried to claim that the creator of the format had wanted a certain pronunciation, but we knew that didn’t matter.
Exactly, and part of good communication is good pronunciation, because if you mispronounce things it makes it harder for people to understand you. If you insist on using a nonsensical pronunciation then you’re just trying to make it hard to communicate with you.
That is the most anti-linguistic take ever lmao. There is no such thing as an objectively correct pronunciation, both pronunciations of “gif” are valid in the context of most English conversations.
On another note, the guy who created it said it’s pronounced /dʒɪf/, so if any pronunciation is more “correct” it’s the one you hate. It’s not “some people tried to claim”, that’s what it actually is “correctly” pronounced like according to the only one that can come close to being considered an authority on what the correct pronunciation is.
Your comment being so pretentious and stuck-up about you not liking a pronunciation leads me to believe you’re making the whole “we” thing up, and instead of a group of people being dumbasses and laughing at a correct pronunciation, it was just one person (you) malding about it in their head. Because being the kind of person to actually laugh at something like that in real life, face to face, would be too embarrassing for anyone to actually go through with it. God even just reading your comment makes me feel like I’m looking at made-up Reddit stories again…
Also how people speaking other languages handle names doesn’t have anything to do with this, there’s a big difference between calling someone “wrong” for pronouncing a loanword differently than in the parent language because of the languages’ phonetics & phonotactics not aligning with each other, and insisting that everyone else is “wrong” because their completely linguistically valid, common pronunciation challenges your understanding of the language.
Oxford uses /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation with /gif/ as the secondary in most of their resources (although a lot don’t specify a primary or secondary), Dictionary.com lists /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation, some like Merriam-Webster list both equally, Cambridge less consistent but list both. Clearly the people who’s job is language disagree with you, even if you don’t want to ask for linguists to tell you, they literally make the language references you use. If you want to be stubborn and insist on being wrong, so be it.
You can now continue malding about the fact that you use the incorrect pronunciation for the rest of your life, since apparently that’s how you see language.
But, there are patterns to the language and using a soft “g” sound doesn’t follow those patterns, so it’s objectively a less correct pronunciation.
Who cares about that guy? He made a mistake, he should have looked up how words are pronounced before trying to get people to mispronounce “gif”. If he’d said it was supposed to be pronounced “dug” people would have just ignored him, but his attempt wasn’t that absurd, it was just slightly wrong, so not everyone ignored him the way they should have.
It really sounds like you didn’t have friends. The rest of us did.
Of course it does. How you pronounce things depends on the language you use. How people pronounce the letters “gif” is based on their language. In English, it’s a hard g.
Who makes these mystical “rules” that English surely follows? And who says the patterns you see are objectively more correct, there are a ton of other words with “g”/“gi” that pronounce it with a /dʒ/, you have to do some real mental gymnastics to justify one of them being more correct. There is a point where you have to paint a massively arbitrary line to which patterns are more “correct”, it is a completely subjective matter.
He’s the only one that can be considered an authority on how the word is pronounced LMAO.
Pronunciation isn’t based on spelling, it’s the other way around. Writing is a tool made to accomodate language, and said writing isn’t a pronunciation guide. You’re lobotomized if you think otherwise, especially in English. But regardless, see below.
But he didn’t pronounce it like “dug”. He pronounced it consistently with another common 3-letter word “gin”. Is “gin” wrong now? You can cope with being wrong all you want, but it doesn’t make you less wrong.
Yeah no that writing reads like a fake Reddit story, I refuse to believe even the dumbest teenagers would act like that.
The English writing system isn’t the English language, and the English writing system isn’t consistent enough to make estimations for a pronunciation like that. The only two words in the language that contain “gif” are “gift” and “fungiform”, plus derivatives of course, the latter of which is generally, by standard, pronounced with a /dʒ/ sound. If you think that’s enough basis to go off of to make rules for every other word containing “gif”, and then insist that your pronunciation is “correct”, that’s a you problem.
The same goes for any language – German has mostly-consistent generalized spelling conventions for the language that approximate pronunciation, but a LOT of common words break this convention, including “guken”, “orange”, the ending “-ig”, “toilette”, “vase”, etc. which are pronounced differently than their spelling would lead you to believe. In fact it is most common for Fremdwörter & Lehnwörter to not be spelled typically. Is every German speaker pronouncing those words wrong now? What about Italian languages, which often do the same thing but significantly more? You can look at less and less standardized languages that contain more and more irregularities, until you get to a language like English and see that the “irregularities” in the writing system completely outweigh any actual “regularities” you see and it becomes completely pointless to try to enforce a pronunciation based on a certain spelling. It’s why people learning a language like English or Tibetan or even Danish will have often cite the spelling as an extreme pain point (I can corroborate the first based on my experience teaching ESL), it is an inconsistent orthography where the spelling is almost entirely dependent on the etymology or something else, rather than any current pronunciation.
It’s also convenient how you left out the entire part about the dictionaries. Almost as if that was a silver bullet for your flawed argument and you can’t acknowledge it because it would make you look too crazy. Because the people who are the most looked up on for “correct” language by most English speakers say you’re wrong. Hmmm.
When you consider that a large number of words in English which are spelled the same have different pronunciations or are pronounced wildly phonemically differently by different speakers or in different dialects, like “minute”, “combat”, “perfect”, “read”, “bass”, “close”, “agape”, “object”, “sewer”, “wind”, “wound”… “apricot”, “leisure”, “often”, “crayon”, “either”, “been”, “caramel”, “garage”, “yogurt”… your argument about pronunciation based on “spelling rules” falls apart pretty quickly.
Present your argument on how English works to any linguists or even anyone who has basic knowledge of linguistics and you’ll be laughed out of the room.
He’s just the guy who invented the software and coined a name for it, he has no authority over how that should be pronounced. If he came up with a ridiculous pronunciation (as he did) he should be laughed at and people should use a sensible pronunciation.
Of course it is. That’s how spelling works. In English it isn’t nearly 1:1 like other languages, but spelling is very strongly tied to how a word is pronounced.
Yes, it is. That’s why people pronounce it with a hard “g”, because they’ve internalized the rules for spelling vs. pronunciation in English and know that those 3 letters in that order has a hard g.
There are slight differences in pronunciation, not wild differences. The differences are so slight that normally you can understand the word someone is using in another dialect without difficulty. And, in every English dialect “gift” has a hard g, as does “gif”.
always remember that yiff is a valid option
I don’t like the color noise, so yeah it’s fine with me.