This always attracts pedants whining “the creator said to pronounce it like jif!” and it’s like, OK, A) That’s an appeal to authority, one of the best known logical fallacies B) The creator of Mother’s Day spent over 30 years trying to get people to stop celebrating it, but too bad, I’m still gonna wish my Mom a happy Mother’s Day, you know?
^^^this. Nobody is “wrong”. Say it how you want to. Either way is fine. But get all cocky and tell me I’m wrong for using a soft g and you better be able to defend that assertion, because I’ve heard every argument for why a hard g is the only correct way to say it and they’re all bs.
it’s not an appeal to authority, if the choice was his, not ours, to begin with. Tons of acronyms have letters that are pronounced differently. It could be arbitrary because an acronym is its own separate word.
Divers don’t dive oonderwater with their scuba gear. And when they take a camera with them, they don’t get the pictures saved as jaypheg files.
The choice can be arbitrary. Since it is, the creator gets to decide. Like whoever discovers a new species of creature gets to name it whatever they like.
When I rise to power anyone who disagrees will be immediately found guilty of thought crimes and sentenced to castration, followed by execution, in that order.
I’m going to avoid all controversy and just make the g silent. It’s ‘if from now on.
If I say it fast enough, people will just assume I use their version.
I’m not aware of any word that changes pronunciation of the first letter by adding a letter at the end. The closest thing we have to GIF is “gift”, being “gif” with an extra “t” at the end. By that logic GIF should be pronounced like “gift” without the “t”.
GIF (J sound). For those who are confused or don’t understand the debate, many people forget phonetics, and that letters can make different sounds depending on the use case. The words below use a soft g sound, like in the word “Justice”, (at least with US English). Pronouncing them with a hard g sounds odd, but only due to us being used to the way use pronounce them already. Though it doesn’t matter much, saying with a soft G (J sound) is easier and faster to say due to how one’s mouth moves. Saying it with a hard G requires more muscle, bringing one’s tongue to the back of the mouth to produce a hard G “Google”.
Tbh, I used to pronounce it ‘JIF’ (because in my native language, ‘gi’ is always a soft ‘g’, and I usually speak that), but now that I think about it in English, a hard G makes more sense.
In Romanian I also pronounce gigabytes as jigabytes :)
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