• @[email protected]
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    1811 months ago

    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.

    • palordrolap
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      911 months ago

      That guy must have really enjoyed getting jifts at Christmas.

      In other news, can we hook a dynamo up to wherever he’s buried because the high RPM would probably power a small country at this point.

      • @[email protected]
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        211 months ago

        jifts for Christmas

        Yes, the time when you eat gingerbread and drink ginormous amounts of gin, if you get the gist

        Let’s hang everybody who claims that gif is pronounced jiff, but not because (as you seem to imply) that’s not how “gi” is read in English because nothing is read always like anything ever in English

        • palordrolap
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          111 months ago

          All English words that start “gif-” (and for that matter “giv-”) have a hard g.

          While English is well known for a mess of exceptions, GIF has, or had, no precedent for soft G, so you’ll forgive people for thinking that the choice of soft G on GIF is a little unusual and being rubbed the wrong way by it.

          • @[email protected]
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            311 months ago

            All words that start with “gif” have a hard g because there is only one: gift. If “gift” had a soft g, then all the words that start with “gif-“ would have a soft g. If it only has one case of application it’s an accident, not a rule.

            And again, saying this as somebody who agrees on “gif” having a hard g despite the delirious claims of its inventor.