As the holiday season is upon us and a Hackaday scribe sits protected from the incoming Atlantic storms in her snug eyrie, it’s time for her to consider the basics of her craft. Writing, spelling, and the English language; such matters as why Americans have different English spellings from Brits, but perhaps most important of them all for Hackaday readers; is it “gif”, or is is “jif”? This or the jokey sentence about spellings might be considered obvious clickbait, but instead they’re a handle to descend into the study of language. Just how do we decide the conventions of our language, and should we even care too much about them?
Don’t Believe Everything You Read in School
We are sent to school to Learn Stuff. During that time we are deprived of our liberty as a succession of adults attempt year after year to cram our heads with facts. Some of it we find interesting and other parts not so much, but for the majority of it, we are discouraged from thinking for ourselves and are instead expected to learn by rote a set of fixed curricula.
Thus while writers have to discover for themselves that English is a constantly evolving language through which they can break free of these artificial bounds that school has imposed upon them, far too many people remain afraid to put their head above the linguistic parapet.
The result is that perceived deviations from the rules are jumped upon by those afraid to move with the language, and we even find our own linguistic Holy Wars to fight. The one mentioned above about “gif” versus “jif” is a great example, does it really matter that much whether you pronounce it with a hard “G” because that’s how most people say it, or as though it were a “J” because the creator of the file format said it that way? Not really, because English is an evolving language in the hands of those who speak it, not those of the people who write school books.
Sadly it’s not quite time to rejoice though, because even if some of those rules can move with the times, it’s not a free for all. Language has to be mutually intelligible, we can’t simply make it up as we go along. The professionals take what they call a descriptive approach, where they tell you how you use the language, in contrast to proscribing how you should be using it. They do this through statistical analysis of large corpora, bodies of text, to see which forms are gaining the most traction. And here’s where this becomes interesting, because a large scale language analysis can tell you things you didn’t know about a subject you thought you knew a lot about.
How I Wasn’t The Inventor Of Computational Linguistics
I got my introduction to language analysis about fifteen years ago, when I was working on improving the search engine visibility of a very large website. This wasn’t the dodgy smoke-and-mirrors world of shady search engine manipulation back then, instead I was there to improve hugely upon the site’s content and in short, make it a lot more interesting for both human and search engine alike. In this endeavour a bit of text analysis is incredibly useful, and before I knew it a few simple PHP scripts for wrangling text had become a fully-fledged suite.
I had without knowing that it was already a field, invented the whole subject of computational linguistics for myself, and even though I now know that work to be laughably inefficient, it did deliver the goods and help tell me and the site owner just where they’d gone wrong.
Having got a taste for language analysis, it’s become one of those projects which has stayed with me over many years as I’ve returned to it from time to time as my interest has waxed and waned, and my original suite has grown into something much more useful. And that’s the point of writing about it here, because there’s nothing too difficult about it. If I can do it so can you, so it’s worth making a stab at describing it.
To build a corpus of text for analysis, it’s first necessary to start with some text. I was particularly interested in time-series data as much as language, so I took as my source as many RSS feeds as I could find. This provided me with a never-ending supply of new text to add to my analysis, and my workhorse has been a Raspberry Pi with a large USB hard drive which quietly spends a part of the day fetching stories and crunching them.
So faced with a newly retrieved piece of text, what’s my first step? Before anything else, to strip away extraneous HTML and website cruft, something which used to be a huge annoyance of rules until I discovered Lynx has a -dump command line option which does all the heavy lifting. Then it’s time to split it by sentence delimiters such as full stops and question marks, and split the sentences by words into an array. I can then step through it word by word, and process what I find into my data store.
How Do You Quickly Fetch One Word In A Billion?
When you have a few thousand data points, there are plenty of options when it comes to data storage. An SQL database for example is a great idea. But a corpus grows to a huge size, and quickly leaves behind normal approaches to storage. There may be some amazing piece of software capable of handling billions of word instances but I never found it, so I opted for something built into my filesystem. I would use filesystem paths as queries, creating a directory tree of words which I could query simply by typing in a path.
So as I step through the words in a sentence, I’m interested in their frequencies, and their collocates, i.e. the words the appear alongside. So for every word I would create a directory with a JSON file inside to record its occurrence, and within that directory I would create a subdirectory for the following word with a corresponding JSON file. Thus for example I could find the popularity of the word “Neil” by opening the JSON in the /neil/ directory, and find the prevalence of the phrase “Neil Armstrong” in /neil/armstrong/. I could also compare the relative occurrence of the Neils Armstrong and Young, by looking in both /neil/armstrong/ and /neil/young/. The nice thing about this filesystem approach is that the server-side processing script, still in PHP, was very simple, and my client could be some Javascript in the browser that would retrieve all those JSONs in real time from the filesystem.
The beauty of having billions of words of English analysis only a mouse click away is that I can very easily check which is the more appropriate version of a phrase, how popular an ephemeral phrase really is, and even the relative popularity of public figures such as politicians. It’s like having my own linguistic truth verifier without having to rely on what others tell me, which in my line of work can be very useful. It does of course come with drawbacks, for example doing any work with a tree of many millions of subdirectories and small JSON files becomes very tedious. Making a tarball of even a medium size data structure takes a couple of days, meaning moving it to a new disk requires some planning.
This may not have been the usual fare for describing a personal project on Hackaday, but it’s one which includes no less development time and technological evolution than any of my hardware work. If you’d like to follow in my footsteps then I’m afraid I’m shy of releasing my ill-formed mess of old PHP and Javascript, but given that its function is pretty well described above I think most of you could write one yourself if you turned your mind to it. Even if you don’t, I hope this has given you an insight into how a corpus analyser works and can tell you things you didn’t know, and you’ll follow my advice not to listen to everything your schoolteacher told you.
Given the hard G of Graphics Interchange Format, I prefer gif – though of course it might be giraffe interchange format, in which case I am wrong.
I concur.
I agree, but, unfortunately, that means we now have to start pronouncing JPEG like JFEG because the ph in photograph…
It’s correctly pronounced “JTAG”. P as in “Pterodactyl” and E as in “Eight”
JTAG? Aren’t those the competitor to the apple air tag? I think Joogle makes them.
And here I was thinking JTAG was the standard for printed circuit boards
I thought they were the appliance people. The JTAG repairman sits around all day because JTAGs are just that reliable.
The P is silent, like in “Swimming Pool.”
If the P is silent, then it’s “Swimming Ool”, which you don’t want P in it.
Or as my father said when I asked him about the pronunciation of ‘debt’, “the B is silent, like the P in swimming.”
That’s an interesting thought.
Reminds me of ISS.
It’s International Space Station, so the “I” should be pronounced like “eee” or “eew” rather than “eye”.
It’s a bit different as it’s pronounced as a TLA (eye ess ess) so you are wording the letters themselves, whereas GIF is pronounced as a word (and not gee eye eff).
I’m probably being pedantic, as well as a bit late to the game. but GIF is an acronym (an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word) and ISS is an initialism (an abbreviation consisting of initial letters pronounced separately).
It was a TIL for me so I thought others might be interested.
Although this may be another example of language evolving and TLA actually becoming an actual TLA.
Acronyms’ pronunciations are independent of the underlying words. GAN ‘ghan’ = Generative Adversarial Network
Try this with SCUBA or LASER
Scuhba and lace-er; yet most people pronounce as scooba and lazer
No. Cuba, Tuba, Aruba
Scuhba is spelled scubba.
It’s funny because that’s the go-to reasoning everyone makes but it’s completely irrelevant and doesn’t really make sense to do that. The only bearing the source words of an acronym have are for spelling. If the source words dictated the pronunciation of the acronym, then we’d probably be pronouncing most of them wrong. NASA, scuba, laser, FOMO, YOLO, PIN… try it with those acronyms and see how it sounds.
And here we are again :-)
Is it LateX like the liquid rubber or after his inventor (x for tech) so LateX = Latech. I personally stay with InDesign and Matlab.
It is not an X like twitter. It is the Greek letter Chi, and LaTeX is pronounced latek : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Pronouncing_and_writing_%22LaTeX%22
There’s an animated GIF for “Giraffics Interchange Format” that I adore, a joke taken as literally as possible.
One of my favorite teachers from 7th grade social studies liked to open the year telling the class that “GHOTI” is pronounced the same as “FISH”. The “GH” from “enough”, the “O” from “women”, and “TI” from “nation”. It was a ridiculous example that illustrated that English is hard and we shouldn’t assume we know everything just because we passed a few English classes.
Then what do you call that little chip you insert into your phone to connect to the cell network?
Subscriber IDENTIFICATION Module
It’s a “SIME” card.
Or else you can pronounce the acronym as if it was a word and say “JIF”.
Except you’re not saying graphics interchange format. Otherwise it would be a ‘gur’ or ‘gii’ ‘eye’ ‘eff’ (gii like wii but with a hard G sound, like the beginning of “great”). You are saying G I F. Say G, then I, then F. Now do it again. Now do it again, quicker. Quicker again. And faster. And faster and faster and faster until the individual letters blend together into a single word like sound. What are you saying? Geeiff, Geriff, Or Jh-iff? And thats why it uses the sound for the singular letter ‘g’, because you’re not saying a shortened word, you are saying an acronym quickly. Get over it.
Also, Oxford English Dictionary, Miriam Websters English Dictionary, AND THE INVENTOR OF THE FORMAT all said that either way was valid. Now, can we all stop by gatekeeping by nit picking reasons to tell people they’re wrong, and instead get on Hack a days ass for dragging up this tired old story told a bajillion times over simply to fill space on an apparently slow tech news day for the sake of drumming up drama in the reader base? Can we? Please? Itd be a really nice belated xmas/hanukkah present if this site got back to the cool stuff it posted in the long ago, and got rid of this pseudo geek blogger sphere gizmodo buzzfeed style it fell into about a decade ago…. Seriously its garbage compared to what it used to be. And I refuse to apologize for pointing that out. Again.
It is and always was GIF, some of us were alive in the ’90s.
For those of you who insist on the hard G do you also call your friend Geoff “ghee off”?
I don’t know, nor do I want to know anyone that spells Jeff, Geoff…… Do you use Joogle search?
Reminded me of Peanut (Jeff Dunham ventriloquist) calling him “Jef-Fa-Fa… you’re using an unnecessary F……am I pissing you of-fa-fa?”
That spelling “Geoff” is quite common. Ruby, don’t take your sucking at names to town.
Yes, what’s your point?
There is no point Jill, beyond me not understanding where the soft G comes from – I know the creator said it was Jif, but I just couldn’t see why. Also, I was taking the p!ss.
Because choosey developers choose gif. It may be unsatisfying to you but the explanation is in the docs. The creator was riffing on the peanut butter brand.
The why is simple. They kept saying the letters. Jee eye eff. got tired of saying them like that and squished it together. so it started as jif because the first letter is pronounced with a j sound. maybe it doesn’t need to stay that way, but the original reasoning is simple enough.
Just checking; you’re definitely not called Gil right? ;)
I get the “J to G” transformation but how this affects second “i” to become capital? ;)
Yes, Ghim.
Ghim, it’s Ensign Pillsbury. He’s — he’s bread, Ghim!
The I or E makes the G soft and pronounced as a J.
get, girl, gift, giggle, gills, gig, gecko, geyser, giddy, gibbon…
ginger, giraffe, giblets, gibbering, giant, gesticulate, geriatric, germ, geology, genuflect…
The genuinely generous giraffe gesticulates in George’s general geography.
Gigantic mistake! You probably mispronounce the Greek root giga, too. Doc Brown was actually technically correct back in the 80s when he called them jiggawatts, even if later on, the tech term that had been passed on verbally between scientists became a printed prefix on hard drives, and the Hooked on Phonics set tried their best to sound it out at the time without asking for help.
Geoff is an oddly spelled NAME
GIF is an acronym
Wilhite was a sad lonely man who feared he would be forever forgotten so he bullshitted his way into being remembered with his senseless peanut butter pronounciation
Graphics
Interchange
Format
Do you pronounce Graphics with a J?
NO?
Then GIF is pronounced as GIFt without the T
What’s wrong with giraffics?
Last summer I was talking with a cow-orker about farm animals.
He mentioned that his uncle had a team of giraffes he would use in parades. As his uncle lived about an hour or so away; I wondered why I hadn’t heard of them. Something as unusual as that would certainly have been mentioned in local news stories.
A couple of days later, I realized he was talking about “drafts” (work horses).
Doh!
The P in JPEG is short for “photographic,” nobody says “jay-feg”
The P in photographic is modified by the H, which was excluded from the acronym. If they had chosen to call it a JPhEG then your expectation would apply. They did not.
Every word I can think of that begins with GIF is derived from GIFT.
Offer challenge with a single word in the english language in which begins with GIF is pronounced jif. Until then this remains the desperate attempt of a man to leave his mark by gaslighting his way into conversation with idiocy.
“Geoff is an oddly spelled NAME”
IIRC, Geoff and Jeff derived from Godfrey, which derived from God-free
Er, no.
From the Germanic name Godefrid, which meant “peace of god” from the Old German elements got “god” and fridu “peace”. The Normans brought this name to England, where it became common during the Middle Ages.
https://www.behindthename.com/name/godfrey
Thanks for the correction!
(And the link!)
Do you pronounce ‘laser’ without a ‘z’ and hard ‘a’ sound? Do you pronounce ‘scuba’ without the ‘oo’ sound?
Acronyms’ pronunciations are independent of the underlying words. GAN ‘ghan’ = Generative Adversarial Network.
How is G pronounced when alone again?
Do you pronounce LASER with an ah sound too? Because by your logic it should be something like Lah Dairy instead of Layzer.
Besides, while it is formally Graphics Interchange Format, devs at the time called it “Giant Image File” due to the sometimes massive file sizes it might be, so Jif is still fine. They also load quickly, in a jiffy, so there is the speed association in there as well.
Do you use Joogle search?
I’ve never once seen nor heard of someone named Geoff, but, if I read it, I would call them “Ghee-off” of “Geo-ff” (geo like in geology).
It’s “Jeff”
I’m a Geoff/Geoffrey, but have worked with various people unfamiliar with Western names over the years and have had all the various pronunciations, including, in more recent years, Joffrey…
yes, yes I do cause its an idiotic name and deserves to be ridiculed
Or you can just say each letter, like the acronym it is. G. I. F.
The defining feature of an acronym is that you pronounce it as a word. You’re thinking of an initialism.
It was soft G in the mid-90s for me
Ditto
Except… In the tech field, most programmers and dev related folks used jif as the pronunciation, having heard it from the original devs mouth. Choosy devs choose Jif.
You may have been around in the 90’s, but I was around in the 80’s when GIF was created, and we all called it Jif, which is the correct way to pronounce it, and always was and always will be.
I always pronounce it letter by letter, G.I.F., just for the L.O.Ls
Never did. But my family and me said “Yot-Peg” to JPEG. In the 90s or so.
But we’re no English native speakers, anyway.
If it’s an acronym, you could say each letter, “G. I. F.”, or say the full name “Graphics Interchange Format”
Same goes with PNG, BMP, NASA, JPEG, etc…
Okay, that makes JPEG sound Yot-Pew-Eh-Ghew.
Or worse, using German spelling alphabet Julius/Paula/Emil/Gustav (old) or Jena/Potsdam/Essen/Görlitz (new).
Because, we non-native speakers of English language tend to switch back to our mother language when spelling or mentioning numbers.
Now imagine what happens at workplace. Using the alphabet of our mother language helps to avoid issues, but the correct pronouncing gets lost that way.
Hm. How about using international spelling alphabet?
Juliet-Papa-Echo-Golf.
I think that’s the best solution. Unfortunately, most citizens here don’t seem to know it. They do remember the awful national spelling alphabet only. Like my ex math teacher. *sigh* 😔
Yes, same reason I will always say Dohguh-coin and not dozhe-coin.
Inventor gets naming rights, including preferred pronunciation. If you want to deviate, that is your right, but you can’t be said to be using the ‘correct’ pronunciation.
“Inventor gets naming rights, including preferred pronunciation. If you want to deviate, that is your right, but you can’t be said to be using the ‘correct’ pronunciation.”
The question, is, though, which English language or English dialect has “the authority”?
The one that the inventor used?
Or the one that’s being taught in school?
In GB, there’s Scottish English, West Midlands English, BBC English, Oxford English, Cambridge English etc. Just to name a few (I’m not from GB).
In the US, there’s equally much diversity. About each state has different spelling and accents.
Same goes for Australia or Canada, they have their own variations.
Just think of the letter “Z”.
Some pronoune it as “C”, while some pounce it similar to “sad” or “set”.
That being said, I tend torwards to agree with using the inventor’s preference. 🙂
But he/she may not necessarily use “correct” English, either. If there is any.
The guy who invented it says it’s pronounced “jif” like the American peanut butter. Anything else is wrong. On this there can be no debate. Of some relevance to this article:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?231228
http://asecular.com/blog.php?231230
Ah, so it is Jraphics Interchange Format. Seen using a jraphics card.
Good to know ;)
Goes nicely with the J – FEG format (the P in JPEG stands for “photographic”).
Yeah, but that’s pronounced “jay-feg”.
Giraffe is pronounced with a soft G, so I’m not sure what you’re on about. Gr— is not the same as Gi—
Presumably he also pronounces the longform as japhics interchange format? And uses a jafics card when displaying them?
I’m guessing you’re unfamiliar with the words “gin” or “giraffe.”
Are you suggesting GIF is Giraffe Interchange Format?
“Are you suggesting GIF is Giraffe Interchange Format?”
Absolutely, if that will make you happy.
Choosy Commenters choose gif!
B^)
“If two witches would watch two watches, which witch would watch which watch?” 🙂
Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger … *
* – I apologize for my brain. It sometimes generates really irksome associations that I feel compelled to share with everyone. :D
True, there can be no debate that he said that. That doesn’t bear on whether he’s right or wrong though (it’s GIF)
I never knew that was how yanks pronounced “Jif”! From now on I’ll be sure to let them know that the letter ‘g’ exists if they want to pronounce it the same was ‘GIF’ is.
It ain’t jiraffe, jerbil, or jinjer…
Hey! Do not talk shit about jinjer! Quite decent band! Haha!
Pronunciation doesn’t determine a word’s meaning…spelling does. Spelling is always primary in any language, and if some people cannot pronounce their own alphabet properly, too bad.
If is GIF…not JIF…and I am not a native English speaker (though I am from a former British colony). :-)
Japanese left the chat…
>> Spelling is always primary in any language
Except English. Ask the folks living in Worcester(shire).
Or Greenwich, Southwark, Arkansas, etc. etc.
Reminds me of the Worchestersauce vs Wacholdersoße confusion/mix-up.
Spelling is always secondary if only for the fact that it comes after phonetics and is a rather inaccurate attempt to put it in graphic form – for those languages that actually try to do that (as some do not bother and prefer ideograms). Writing is essentially the representation of speech.
The creator of the format has stated that it’s pronounced JIF, just like the American peanut butter brand and he uses the example of a modified version of the peanut butter’s advertising slogan of “Choosy developers choose GIF” to illustrate the correct pronunciation. It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.
Peanut butter brand? The only JIF I now here in blighty is a scouring powder or kitchen cleaner! :o)
Then again there is a JFIF file format IIRC.
Good grief. Who would imagine that the pronounciation of a file format would be so divisive? This is the kind of crap that starts wars.
coop vs. cooperate
waif vs. naif
Then there’s:
tough (rhymes with buff)
though (rhymes with owe)
trough (rhymes with off)
through (rhymes with threw)
thorough (rhymes with owe)
thought (rhymes with ought and caught)
In my dialect, trough and off have different vowels.
Going purely off of spelling, it would be pronounced with a soft G. When G is followed by an e or an i for most words in English, a soft G is used (gin). However, this only applies to words in English from romance roots. Words of Germanic origin keep using the hard G (like Girl, or Gift).
So, it might be most technically correct to use a soft g as all the words in G-I-F are indeed romance, but there is no rule that you must use pronunciation of a new word based on its roots. Nor is there a rule that the person who coins a words can define how it should be said.
You can have Latin and Greek roots and choose to use German pronunciation and ignore the original intent, it’s not like, illegal.
Yep, spelling matters, that’s why Girrafe isn’t spelled Guirrafe
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gif
I don’t GIF a damm ;) In dutch gif is also the word for poison. And the Dutch G is more like the Scottish ch as in loch, so that’s another way to say GIF and how I’ve pronounced it for the longest time.
+1 😃👍
Here it’s Gift, btw, like the English present.
And from there it’s just a short segue to talking about the artist: “Van Go” (as Americans, wrongly pronounce it, like the Tent manufacturer ;-) ), or “Van Goff” (as Brits wrongly pronounce it), when the closer pronunciation is “Van Goch” (as in Scottish ‘Loch’, a hybrid sound between ‘h’ and ‘k’ – i.e. like a ‘k’, but not fully closed). Or is ‘Van’ more like ‘Fan’?
Yeah, Van is pronounced more like “Fan” but a bit harder on the F sound.
its officially spelled “Oh No, not one of those again” and deleted immediately.
If only the jpeg folks had just included animation in the original spec, I’d think we’d be at the point where people would be asking “What’s a GIF?”
These days, GIF is mainly short-hand for “short animated graphic” such that it’s weird to see a static one.
As a Brit having listening to American podcasts, the one thing that keeps annoying me – of all the pronunciation differences – is “era” being pronounced the same as “error”.
The problem is that there are many sentences where both words are valid, so it frequently forces you into re-evaluating sentences you’d already heard and interpreted.
I don’t pronounce those words the same way: (eruh, errer). Maybe the ambiguous pronunciation is a podcast dialect.
I can’t actually think of anyone I know who does pronounce them the same way. I suppose some east coast dialects would sound like that. As for me, I don’t have an accent.
Now you’ve reminded me of the Mid-Atlantic Accent; used when Hollywood was great.
>> is “era” being pronounced the same as “error”
That would apply to specific accents only (Boston comes to mind) – it’s not a universal pronunciation. Most Brits would I think expect the former to be pronounced with a long “e” (“eerah”), whereas in North America it’s usually a short e (“errah”), but error has a pronounced extra r at the end (except in Boston).
But you Brits have your own unique accents to deal with (Brummie, anyone?).
As a Brit I’d say: ‘air-uh’ for ‘era’. I’d have short, hard ‘e’ for ‘error’: ‘eh-ruh’. So, also the emphasis is different, in ‘era’ the ‘r’ belongs with the ‘e’, but with ‘error’ it belongs with the ‘uh’.
That’s not the worst though, for Brits hearing Americans say: “sodder” instead of “solder” (we say: “sol-der”, “sodder” sounds kinda rude in British English!
> I’d have short, hard ‘e’ for ‘error’: ‘eh-ruh’.
What happened to the trailing ‘r’ in ‘error’? I think that’s your confusion – Americans (mostly – looking at you, Boston) pronounce the ‘r’ at the end when saying ‘error’, and rightly omit it when saying ‘era’ because….it doesn’t have one. Whereas Brits omit the ‘r’ on both words.
Generally speaking, if you hear an American say ‘era’ they mean ‘era’, not ‘error.’
Except in Boston.
American accents are actually more accurate than posh British non-rhotic mispronunciation. In a weird way, the USA ended up preserving more traditional pronunciation while the British elites invented a new accent to distinguish tenancies from commoners (they tutored the wealthy how to speak it, and it eventually caught on in lower classes as they in turn tried to emulate royalty etc)
Not trying to dog you, I just find the topic interesting and most people assume it to be the other way around.
More on topic, l have always pronounced GIF with a soft G
The topic is indeed fascinating, I agree with you.
Funnily, British citizens aren’t necessarily speaking so politely in real life as we Europeans had always learned in school.
In some cases, the average US citizen may speak a clearer or more polite English. If/she he isn’t drunk and behaving like an antisocial in question, I mean. ;)
Here’s an example from the British English dub of Lum, for example. By comparison, the official English dub or US dub was very tame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hqE2ycXxCw
If you think ‘era’ annoys you, wait until you hear how they pronounce ‘solder’ :)
Water bottle
American: “wah-der bah-dul”
British: “wUHHT-er bUHHT-ul”
Cockney: wa’er bah’el
Texan: Whataburger
Aluminum.
Enjoy.
Oh, no, it’s SUPPOSED to be aluminium. Just like platinium, tantalium, and molybdenium. Similar to the obsolete ferrium, argyrium, stannium, aurium…
Compromise: “alumium”
Alumnium!
B^)
It’s Platin, Tantal, Molybdän, Eisen, Silber, Zinn and Gold.
I’m German and have no sense of humor.
And “Wolfram” is pronounced “Tungsten”
..and Aluminium is “Alu”.
Because it’s efficient to say so.
For some reason… “Modern Major General”
Or sulphur.
A color catalog of my favorite homeopathic analog computerized aluminum airplane immobilizers,
-or-
A colour catalouge of my favourite homoeopathic analouge computerised aluminium aeroplane immobilisers,
that is the question.
Presumably there’s no Unobtanium in the USA. Just Unobtainum.
USA is deprecated. Had been superseded by USB..
I l̶a̶u̶g̶h̶e̶d̶ laffed
There are exceptions, but generally in English, G is soft if followed by I or E and hard if followed by any other letter.
Also, have you ever noticed that English words don’t end in V?
maglev, improv, leitmotiv
Sure, the first two are abbreviations and the last an alternate spelling of a loan word. But English is chock full of abbreviations, loan words, and alternate spellings.
Maybe it would be cleaner if we just change it to CIF and be done :)
(I suspect this joke is only going to make sense to Brits)
I am not Brit – should it be C like in Cindirella – “SIF” or C like in Cat – “KIF”?
Reminds me of the problem with the word “China” in German.
There are three ways to pronounce it, at least.
She-na, Kee-na and Ch-eee-na (Ch sound, a bit like in “cheap”).
For me it’s Monty Python’s Travel Agent sketch :)
And that’s why we Brits say: “Ggiff”, not “Jif”, because the latter was a cleaning fluid (hence your joke – good one :-D )!
Graphic Interchange Format. The sound of the G should follow the G in the first word of the file format.
Then to be consistent, you should adjust how you pronounce these other acronyms:
Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Joint Photographic Experts Group
Nobody says lasser or naysah or jfeg, the pronunciation of acronyms is independent of the words they draw their letters from.
ok i have seen this about 100 times in this thread already, how come you insist on using the PH sound for jpeg? its the sound of the first letter, until you decide its not … under your rules it should be JoFExGr
Late reply but: I think you got my point exactly. Acronyms are pronounced as they are written, they are not tied to the pronunciation from the words of origin
Since this caused so much discussion why not throw ‘giga’ into the mix. It came from the word for giant but is usually pronounced incorrectly.
1.21 gigawatts!
Giga, the root word of giant and gigantic.
(soft g)
And I’m going to throw ‘nuclear’ into the mix. Like Jimmy Carter pronounced it or like George W. Bush pronounced it.
I’ll go with Jimmy cause he had hands-on nuclear experience.
Nuke-ya-lurr makes it sound like you think it’s magic.
“new, clear”. Not “nukuler”.
New-clee-are
Not nook-lea?
Late to the game, but how about Lovecraft’s pronunciation of “Cthulhu”?
Or, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, Wales?
Krungthepmahanakornamornratanakosinmahintarayutthayamahadilokphopnopparatrajathaniburiromudomrajaniwesmahasatharnamornphimarnavatarnsathitsakkattiyavisanukamprasit, Thailand?
The simple fact that your “phonetic” spellings are “gif” and “jif” pretty much closes the book on the fact that everyone already knows how to pronounce “gif”.
Not to cling to artificial bounds or anything and I fully acknowledge that language evolves but when you have to add a special exception to the language because some techie 40 years ago didn’t know how to pronounce “gif” it is just idiocy.
*give mic*
Sir, please pronounce the name of the country west of Chad. We are currently live worldwide.
Chad who?
Mr. Chad, first name is Republic of
It’s pornounced the French way – knee-zher
I fully expect anyone who insists “gif” must be pronounced with a hard “g” because of the pronunciation of the word “graphics” to also pronounce “laser” according to the pronunciation of its individual words: “lass-eer”. If not, then why not? Is that not hypocrisy?
Good point, even though I’m not sure if I can fully follow as a non-native speaker.
I always thought it’s pronounced lay-ser in English.
Btw, how to pronounce “computer” properly?
Come-puter or Cam-puter?
And what about “data”? Day-ta or Daah-ta?
I suppose the first one because of Mr. Data from TNG.
Plural; daters
I pronounce data as “info”….to avoid the whole thing
When the early hams had to make each letter distinct as well as words us US’ians followed suit. GIF sounds like gift, but the brand of peanut butter known for extra sugar added is not as common, but It’s jiffy in loading viewing etc.
The best example of this is math (mathematic- s- al- ian) or that British word that has teething tonguing hissing sounds that want to go on forever, worse than wasps.
What about “giga” as in gigawatts / gigahertz / gigabytes…. Since the canonical (received) pronunciation as it came down to us in “Back to the Future” was a hard ‘g’ as in ‘jigawatts’, I felt a constant need to correct everyone when we started getting hard drives of more than 1000 megabytes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5cYgRnfFDA
1) I’m fairly certain any IT person I’ve ever worked with would mercilessly needle someone who pronounced billion-byte capacity drives as a number of “Jigs”.
2) And yes, I do indeed believe that common usage, used millions of times since it’s inception, have created proper usage. It’s not peanut butter! File type .GIF: hard G, no exceptions.
“a hard ‘g’ as in ‘jigawatts’” In English that’s called “a soft g”. Go again.
Right! Going again then: A soft “g” as in “jigawatts”.
For those interested, a piece by contributing editor Kevin Self, in the “Technically Speaking” column of IEEE Spectrum magazine of October 1994, on page 18 under the subheading “Gigantic Problem” says: ”
What is the correct way to pronounce the first g in giga, we were asked by reader R.E. Lafferty of Morris Plains, N.J. He recalled seeing a document about 30 years ago from the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), in which the pronunciation of the prefix meaning billion was given as soft, or a g, as in giant.
Technically Speaking’s perusal of the brochure on metric practice put out by the IEEE and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) supported Lafferty’s earlier research. The brochure’s guide to U.S. pronunciation of metric prefixes states that it should be pronounced jig’a (j as in jig, a as in about) — in other words, with a soft g.
This column has often noted that might makes right when it comes to linguistic misuse. And Lafferty, too, wondered if “with perhaps 90 percent of the technical population using the hard g, it would seem prudent to abandon what is, or was, correct, and flow with the tide.”
According to the 1970 Oxford English Dictionary, the prefix giga derives from gigas, Greek for gigantic. The first (and third) letter of the Greek word is gamma, familiar to most engineers as a hard g.
This apparent contradiction sent us for clarification to Everdeen Tree, a lecturer in Latin (and a Greek scholar) at the University of Houston in Texas. She informed us that although gamma was sounded as a hard g in classical Greek, the pronunciation of words that are transliterated into English generally conforms to English usage. In this case, g followed by i becomes soft, while g followed by a becomes hard.
Tree noted that pronunciations do change over time, however, based on current usage and new historical data. “Originally, gamma was pronounced with a hard sound,” she said. “The soft gamma appeared in the Greek language after the classical era, and in some circles there is a preference for pronunciation closer to the original. Maybe it is time for a change.”
”
I guess the lesson here is that “might makes right”, even in language, and those with the louder voice / bigger bombs / artillery have the right to use them and everyone else must “flow with the tide” or get maimed or die
I think the bigger lesson is that “the pronunciation of words that are transliterated into English generally conforms to English usage.” So those pedants who ostentatiously overpronounce thing to try and sound clever are just being silly. I wonder if it carries over to plurals of word derived from Greek and Latin? It would certainly avoid those silly debates about whether we should say octopuses or octopi or octopodia.
Us Finnish natives do not have any pronunciation problems… 99% of Finnish words are pronounced exactly as written. :D
Then why the double n’s?
And what about PNG?
Like Pong, without the “o” sound. “P’ng”.
Pee ‘n’ Gee? Because of TNG? 😂
If so, how about writing “π&g=” to avoid confusion?
Not a problem, as a Netherman. Gif is a Dutch word (“poison”) and should therefore be pronounced as such, with a guttural G.
Gif-t. Gift. Why can’t you guys just speak proper German?! 😂
I love how the author specifically and comprehensively addresses the subject of language and the purpose of language using a specific example, namely “Gif”. Then, boom, the comment section argues about it like they never read the article. SHOW SOME RESPECT for her work, and fall in line before someone forces you back in line! (/sarcasm).
I was hoping someone else thought the comments trivialized an interesting solution to a problem.
If it’s an acronym, you could say each letter, “G. I. F.”, or say the full name “Graphics Interchange Format”
Same goes with PNG, BMP, NASA, JPEG, etc…
Now, let’s get on to CRUD. It could be DAVE instead, but my new favorite is BREAD (Browse-Read-Edit-Add-Delete)
Yes, it’s an abbreviation.
And you’re right when it comes to English, I suppose.
Though I’m afraid you’re forgetting us non-English speakers here a bit. 🙁
Our alphabet isn’t exactly sounding like the English one.
An English Gee-Eye-Aff maybe gets turned in something Gehw-Eee-Eff.
In German, the letter “Y” (why) is pronounced “Ypsilon”.
The sound E and I are different to English (German I sounds like “eeeh”, while German E sounds like, um, the e in “test” maybe) ..
Also, English “I” (eye) sounds like German word for egg (Ei), which in turn starts with letter E.
This may cause for a short moment of confusion.
The W (Double-You) is pronounced “weeh”.
The “J” is pronounced like “Yot”.
The “V” is pronounced similar to “Foe”.
Now let’s image how French, Italian or Spanish may handle such pronounciation.
They’re not having same roots like Germanic languages have.
All that I can say is that, in thirty+ years in the business, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it “jif.” Just saying.
I don’t pronounce graphics like jraphics
Want jif go buy peanut butter
Just like gigawatt isn’t pronounced like jigawatt
If you spell out the acronym, do you say “jee, eye, eff” or “ghee, eye, eff”?
How do you pronounce “giant” and “gigantic”?
Inconsistent, much?
The inventor of the format said it was pronounced “jif”. End of discussion.
say it with me, Acronyms are not words
It sure is, but only when there’s exactly 1.21 of them
The soft g pronunciation is supported by English three letters words like gin and gym; but was suggested by the creator as a riff on a marketing campaign of the time. And as a moral value I never perpetuate marketing which I have not been compensated for.
The hard g pronunciation is supported by English three letters words like gig and git; but it’s followed by a bunch of folks making no sense arguments about letters in acronyms always being pronounced identically to the pronunciation of their letters in their origin words. And as a moral value, I never follow herds of ignorant folks.
Thus the only acceptable solution is to pronounce the G as silent, as supported by the three letter English word “gnu”.
😛
Does anybody remember “The iRabbit” here? It’s spot on. 🤣
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-J4yweW-Vfs
I find a bit of humor in the fact that this article discussing English language has at least 3 (maybe more) grammatical errors contained within it.
you know there is a popular book from 1880s ish that uses gif, it’s called Sherlock Holmes Study in Scarlet
People, it’s very obvious that it’s pronounced as “gif” and not “jif.” Because the exquisite pun ending with the punchline of “Beware jeeks bearing jifs” just doesn’t sound right.
It’s pronounced however you choose. It’s not a name, nor a place, and no one will misunderstand what you mean. Anyone who says “this is the only way” weds to take a hard look at the English language and realise there are many inconsistencies in its pronunciation.
Isn’t (or at least wasn’t) GIF a proprietary format subject to licensing fees and explicit permission and all that, and thus beyond the pale and not to be used? Thus, who cares how it’s pronounced? :D
Well, yes an no. That’s true but outdated. Compuserve’s GIF itself was free to use and create.
It was the compression algorithm (lzw) that caused licensing trouble.
GIF itself wasn’t the bad boy here.
Anyway, the issue quickly settled back then, but the harm was being done.
Btw, I vaguely remember that JVFax 7.0 still had GIF support, but 7.1 had dropped it.
Here’s one for you, how do you pronounce “ough”? Now, why is it pronounced differently is each of these words?:
though
thought
tough
trough
through
thorough
I love that the main point about the GIF/JIF argument was that it doesn’t matter, and we shouldn’t fight about it, but all the comments are arguing about it, and not talking about the core article content. #Internet
It’s healthy, at least, I suppose.
An old saying states that nothing is worse than indifference.
So as long as people discuss things and question things, there’s hope. 🙂
And I agree with that, even though I’m not a fan of arguments or conflicts.
I agree with that sentiment, but some things are not worth dividing over. The passion would be better spent discussing (respectfully) some other, more important, issue.
But that wasn’t even my point. My point was that the comments are mainly about a thing that the article isn’t about, and had expressly stated was not something the author thought worthwhile discussing.
That’s just my thoughts. It’s been a pleasure discussing this with you. :-)
I just asked AI test2voice to say “GIF” in a pretty en_GB-southern_english_female accent and it replied with a hard G. So did en_US_amy and en_US_joe. So there we go. Now what color did we want to paint the bike shed?
It’s pronounced “jif”, like the peanut butter brand, because it was originally named after the peanut butter brand. Of course the guy came out and said he didn’t care anymore, pronounce it how you like — he’d’ve been burnt at the electronic stake by one side or another if he’d said anything else!
Also, it’s pronounced “gift” with a hard ‘g’, “Jesus” with a ‘j’ (or an ‘i’ if you’re literally a Roman in the time that predates Latin’s ecclesiastical form), “guess” with a hard ‘g’, “Geoff” with a soft ‘g’, etc — because if there’s one thing English is consistent about, it’s inconsistency, and if you fancy yourself a linguist — amateur or otherwise — and haven’t noticed that, or just think you can impose somesuch where it doesn’t belong and never did, well, consider yourself patted gently on the head and told — “there, their, they’re…”
;3
Also, if you disagree, you don’t need to tell me. It’s okay to be wrong sometimes.
Regardless, have a great day — and remember, even in meaningless Internet arguments, it’s nice to have a little random kindness.
The whole “living language” rgument has always been a concession, not a rule.
Language exists to convey ideas.
If you read a word, or hear it spoken in a video, do you track down the author to ask them what THEY meant?
No. Of course not.
That would be insane.
You go to an authority and look up the consensus meanings, then decide on one based on context.
There are e literally ideas that can no longer be expressed concisely, because the word/phrase has become so corrupted that a recipient will always assume a different meaning regardless of the context.