Pronunciation Guide Poster

Follow me please ❤️

Seren Vine

Lol gonna have to send this to my friends

Love this!

Claudy Destin

Came in to become a patron until I saw this. 😐

Babs

wow

Imtiuz Punno

I'm Hungarian and we pronounce everything as they are written using always-the-same letters (it just so happens that G is a "hard G" here as well). And so i find it highly amusing how English people go on about these stupid issues.

TC

My favourite is still "jaive"

Adder

Gin is derived from Jenever, the dutch word for Juniper Berries. Aka, its based on a word that starts with J. Pretty sure GIF is not just another word for the peanut butter company.

Bolexle

"GIF" is not a word, its an acronym. For Graphics Interchange Format. Graphics is a hard "G", therefor GIF should either be pronounced GEE EYE EFF or GIF like GIVE or GILLS. This is not always true however, so default to similarly spelt/used words. Look at Gift for example. Its just GIF with a T. Hard G. Most one-syllable words that start with G have a hard G (not an exhaustive list): Gab. Gad. Gag. Gal. Gam. Gap. Gas. Gay. Get. Gig. Gill. Gimp. Gird. Girl. Git. Give. Go. Goal. Gob. God. Gone. Gore. Got. Guide. Guild. Guilt. Gull. Gulp. Gum. Gun. Gust. Gut. Guy. What about Gin, Gem, Gym, Geo, and Gel? Gin is not a good counterexample because it’s a drink derived from juniper berries, so its name is from the Dutch jenever for “juniper”. Gem comes from the Latin gemma for “jewel”. As for the other words, they are abbreviations of larger words, so they inherited their pronunciations.

Bolexle

Jeebus Will, you came here through the medium of comedy, and yet fail and fall at the first hurdle. 1. You seem mirth free 2. It's pronounced Gif 3. It's not pronounced Jif. 4. I would like to send you 5 cents for your "patronize (patreonize? hah!)" comment. Hopefully if enough people chip in, you might be able to perfect it, and release it worldwide as an actual joke.

Norm Richardson

Oh my god. Lighten up Will.

Clint Hobson

What about gin? The only thing that is consistent with English is that it is consistently inconsistent... or something like that :)

Luke Winkenbach

What about words like general and gigantic? Both could potentially be correct.

sophie

Well, Captain! I have to disagree with you. Wait, what's this...? "Because inventing a thing doesn't give you dominion over how language works."??? He's never really been accused of that. Also, small problem, the IEEE conference generally agreed with him on this (perceived at the time as) inconsequential thing. Call it whatever YOU want, no reasonable person is going to stop you, but I actually came here to donate, not be told semantically that you think I'm wrong because of [fuzzy explanation and default usage of letters]. By the way, I'm an English major with a focus on linguistics, and I'm telling you right now it doesn't make a shit of difference how you say it. So if you're going to patronize (patreonize? hah!) me just for visiting your page, I don't think I'll be making a monthly donation. I would advise your team to stick to topics they're good with, like film editing, and skip bullshit debate.

NuNu

Potayto, potahto. It's fine to have multiple pronunciations of a word. I mean, how do you pronounce "gigabyte"? Unless you're Doc Brown, I bet Merriam-Webster disagrees with you: <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gigabyte" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gigabyte</a> But that's fine! Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. It's society that determines how words are pronounced, and as long as we agree to the point of being able to understand what ideas we're trying to convey, it ain't no problem. Cyclic drift allows language to ebb and flow; to adapt and evolve. It reminds me of how Ted Mosby so often pointed out that it's pronounced (and spelled) encyclopædia.

Rob Spiess

English does have rules, they're just complicated by exceptions thanks to incorporation of other languages. If you're looking for easy things to follow then yeah, it's more guideline like. Specifically since we have a lot of french words, and french has a hard and soft g, most french words do follow those rules: a hard g before back vowels (a, o, u) and a soft g before front vowels (i, e). A notable exception though is for Germanic words which (almost always) use a hard g - gift, gild, get, etc. While GIF is rootless it's common that most words in English that start with a G-vowel are Germanic and thus spoken with a hard G. So the pronunciation would be arguable either way, for a time at least. But if everyone keeps pronouncing it with a hard G, guess how we pronounce it then? It's known as analogical change - most of us logically followed the pattern we had with words like Gift and Gild absent a known pronunciation - which eventually becomes the 'correct' pronunciation. It doesn't matter how the creator says it should be pronounced, it doesn't matter how it was pronounced nearly 30 years ago, what matters is how most people pronounce it now, which is with a hard G. It's really fine to pronounce it with a soft g if you insist on holding to the inventor's wishes but it, at this point, is arguably less correct. A word's creator does not retain dominion over how that word is pronounced for all of time, once the word is in use it is up to the users.

Blake Partridge

Your gently gyrating logical gesticulations are generous and hardly genteel.

Smittypap

Your 3 examples are pronounced the unusual way because they are all etymological imports from French (gin=genever, gel=gélatine and gem=gemme). If we're going to use etymology to decide the pronunciation of GIF, then... the "g" in "Graphics Interchange Format" is hard...

Captain Disillusion

Gin, gel, gem...

Smittypap

"it's simply what I think that this particular words seems like a hard G is what sounds best." Yeah, so that's the guideline that makes the inventor wrong.

Jim Preston

OK, you -could- have had a point... If we were talking about a language that had consistent rules about how to pronounce words. But the thing is, English doesn't have pronounciation rules. It just doesn't. It has —and there are days when I think even the following description is being generous— loose guidelines. English is a mix-up of phonetic letters and hieroglyphs; when you see a new word, you can never be sure how it's pronounced until you hear it. And as such, if the inventor of the word says that it's pronounced "jiff", then that's fine by me. Now, I'll be honest, I'm using a hard G myself, but it's not because of any imaginary rules; it's simply what I think that this particular words seems like a hard G is what sounds best. But I didn't invent it, so I'll happily defer to the inventor.

Hawk DeNunzio

The vast majority of "g" words have the hard-g sound. GET over it. Hard GIF FTW!

Tom Jaworowski

All those examples are "open" syllables and the only closed one (gym) has to use a "y" to modify the "g". You wouldn't "gim" with a [dzh], would you? :P

Captain Disillusion

general genial gentle germ gym giant gif

Christopher G

Hate.

Absolutely Nobody

I think this might be going up on the wall in my office.

Brian Roy

Thank you!!

Michael Krehan

So like with a "Zhy" sound?

GooGhoul

I suppose you say "kissk" for CISC chips? If you say "sisk," you have some explaining to do. - The man whose name is often spelled 'Geoff,' as in "Gee Off."

Jeff Wagg