GIF or JIF?
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I’m reading Head in the Cloud, a book that seems to be mainly about polls conducted by the author. One of them concerns pronunciation of words, and one of the words he has tested is GIF, the name of the file format. Some people say (in English) “gif” /gɪf/ but others, “jif” /dʒɪf/ — and, I’m sure, there’s people who pronounce the individual letters, or say something else entirely.
That got me wondering: The book mentions what the “official” pronunciation is supposed to be, but how do folks on a forum like this say that name? (Again, in English — in daily life I say /χɪf/, but that’s in Dutch. In English, I say /gɪf/.)
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Gif. Hard G
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JIF makes me think of the cleaning agent that got renamed to CIF decades ago.
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@pleegwat For the opening post, I decided not to mention that exact thought I had.
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Gif is pronounced gif.
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@pleegwat said in GIF or JIF?:
JIF makes me think of the cleaning agent that got renamed to CIF decades ago.
And yet that's exactly how I pronounce it. Rightly or wrongly, that's the pronunciation my brain is stuck with.
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@dkf It's how whoever named the format calls it too, IIRC.
I think it stands for jraphic interchange format.
(Although it's a bit hypocritical of me to make fun of that, since I pronounce OpenGL with a soft gee).
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I follow the French pronunciation rules, which means pronouncing it "jif". For the same reason, I pronounce "JPEG" as "G-Peg".
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@zecc said in GIF or JIF?:
I pronounce OpenGL with a soft gee
What, like Open Jill? For me, it's just the letters: Open Gee Ell
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It's pronounced /gɪf/ in moon language (because we just say the damned letters, you overcomplicated Germanic bastards!), so I'm sticking with that. Since even English speakers can't decide properly, I'm sticking with that.
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@jaloopa said in GIF or JIF?:
What, like Open Jill? For me, it's just the letters: Open Gee Ell
As it is for me. I pronounce the letter G with a soft g, is what I'm saying.
Not jee, like @Medinoc does.
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hyeef
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@pleegwat said in GIF or JIF?:
JIF makes me think of
the cleaning agent that got renamed to CIF decades agopeanut butter.
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It's a bit surprising how much gifs have seen a resurgence since CompuServe's infamous LZW patent expired.
Remember when they first asserted the patent and declared that essentially the entire Web owed them royalties for using the GIF format? There was a massive revolt online, with "burn all gifs" banners going up everywhere. A bunch of really smart people got together with the explicit purpose of designing a new image format to replace GIF that would be completely patent-free, and so PNG was born, and people almost completely stopped using GIFs practically overnight, except for cheesy animations.
Moral of the story: beware geeks bearing GIFs.
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@zecc I've always called it "ping."
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@boomzilla said in GIF or JIF?:
@pleegwat said in GIF or JIF?:
JIF makes me think of
the cleaning agent that got renamed to CIF decades agopeanut butter.
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@el_heffe Yes, you're right, of course. Extra crunchy is far superior, but lazy GIS-ing is what it is.
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@zecc said in GIF or JIF?:
@masonwheeler said in GIF or JIF?:
PNG
Supposedly called "ping", but called "pee enn gee" by most.
So is APNG aping the GIF?
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@zecc said in GIF or JIF?:
@jaloopa said in GIF or JIF?:
What, like Open Jill? For me, it's just the letters: Open Gee Ell
As it is for me. I pronounce the letter G with a soft g, is what I'm saying.
Not jee, like @Medinoc does.Actually, I'll bet on @Medinoc pronouncing it /ʒɪf/ rather than /dʒɪf/, because that's how a French speaker would naturally pronounce it. And, to complicate matters, the vowel sounds in the names of the letters G and J are reversed between English and French (both names in French use the soft sound, which doesn't have the initial /d/), so G has the "ay" sound and J the "ee" sound in French.
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@khudzlin said in GIF or JIF?:
that's how a French speaker would naturally pronounce it.
I thought they would just say "le gif"
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@hungrier Contrary to stereotypes, you can't just add a definite article before something to make it French.
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@khudzlin said in GIF or JIF?:
you can't just add a definite article before something to make it French
le sigh, merde!
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@luhmann said in GIF or JIF?:
@khudzlin said in GIF or JIF?:
you can't just add a definite article before something to make it French
le sigh, merde!
And if you said "le merde", you'd sound ridiculous, because the correct form is "la merde" (the expletive is "merde" alone, though). That's because, like Spanish and other Romance languages, French has grammatical gender for its nouns, and the articles and adjectives need to be marked accordingly.
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@zecc said in GIF or JIF?:
@dkf It's how whoever named the format calls it too, IIRC.
That’s what the book also says, yes, but I purposely didn’t mention it. But here you go:
The preferred pronunciation is “jif,” like the peanut butter.
Why? because Steve Wilhite, the format’s inventor, said so.I think it stands for jraphic interchange format.
+1
@masonwheeler said in GIF or JIF?:
the right way to pronounce it is the only way that this pun makes sense
Except it apparently isn’t … for Steve Wilhite, anyway.
@masonwheeler said in GIF or JIF?:
@zecc I've always called it "ping."
Not absolutely always, but once I read that that’s the correct pronunciation, I began using it too. I doubt I will for GIF, though.
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@khudzlin said in GIF or JIF?:
@hungrier Contrary to stereotypes, you can't just add a definite article before something to make it French.
Right: "le gif with cheese."
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@zecc said in GIF or JIF?:
@masonwheeler said in GIF or JIF?:
PNG
Supposedly called "ping", but called "pee enn gee" by most.
Pen'g.
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@gurth said in GIF or JIF?:
The preferred pronunciation is “jif,” like the peanut butter.
Why? because Steve Wilhite, the format’s inventor, said so.I've always thought that was a stupid argument from authority (not saying you agree with it, since it seems like you don't if I'm parsing correctly). Generally speaking, "gif" is used more than "jif", making that the "preferred" pronunciation whether or not Steve Wilhite agrees with it.
Except it apparently isn’t … for Steve Wilhite, anyway.
Whatever floats his boat. :P
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@gurth said in GIF or JIF?:
and, I’m sure, there’s people who pronounce the individual letters
I've heard people who pronounced "app" (you know, short for "application") as "ey-pee-pee" (A.P.P.), as if it were an acronym.
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@heterodox said in GIF or JIF?:
I've always thought that was a stupid argument from authority (not saying you agree with it, since it seems like you don't if I'm parsing correctly).
I don’t. If he wanted it to be pronounced “jif” he should have called it that.
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@khudzlin said in GIF or JIF?:
That's because, like Spanish and other Romance languages, French has grammatical gender for its nouns, and the articles and adjectives need to be marked accordingly.
That's true in other languages, but English (these days) makes almost all of its nouns have the neuter gender.
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@dkf I was talking about French in the post you quoted, not English.
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It's "jif", for the same reason that SCUBA (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) is not pronounced "scubbaa", and LASER (Light Amplification by the Stimulation of Emitted Radiation) is not pronounced "lahseer".
Acronyms are words, not just abbreviations. You don't look at the word that each letter is attached to, you just pronounce the entire thing. And since you're making up the word, you usually pronounce it in the easiest way – so it's a soft G in GIF.
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@hungrier said in GIF or JIF?:
@khudzlin said in GIF or JIF?:
that's how a French speaker would naturally pronounce it.
I thought they would just say "le gif"
Just like le rage comics of le slightly older days of le internet
http://i.imgur.com/J5Fm7.png
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@da-doctah said in GIF or JIF?:
jiraffic
Jiraffic interchange format is an image codec for very tall images
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@anonymous234 I love this meme!!
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@medinoc said in GIF or JIF?:
I pronounce "JPEG" as "G-Peg".
@jaloopa said in GIF or JIF?:
What, like Open Jill?
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@potatoengineer said in GIF or JIF?:
Acronyms are words, not just abbreviations. You don't look at the word that each letter is attached to, you just pronounce the entire thing. And since you're making up the word, you usually pronounce it in the easiest way – so it's a soft G in GIF.
If you’re arguing that a <g> before <i> is always /dʒ/, how do you pronounce the word “gills”?
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@gurth said in GIF or JIF?:
@potatoengineer said in GIF or JIF?:
Acronyms are words, not just abbreviations. You don't look at the word that each letter is attached to, you just pronounce the entire thing. And since you're making up the word, you usually pronounce it in the easiest way – so it's a soft G in GIF.
If you’re arguing that a <g> before <i> is always /dʒ/, how do you pronounce the word “gills”?
Or "girl" or "give". In fact, I'd argue that when you weight the results for how often words with "gi-" are actually used, the G is hard more often than soft.
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@da-doctah said in GIF or JIF?:
@gurth said in GIF or JIF?:
@potatoengineer said in GIF or JIF?:
Acronyms are words, not just abbreviations. You don't look at the word that each letter is attached to, you just pronounce the entire thing. And since you're making up the word, you usually pronounce it in the easiest way – so it's a soft G in GIF.
If you’re arguing that a <g> before <i> is always /dʒ/, how do you pronounce the word “gills”?
Or "girl" or "give". In fact, I'd argue that when you weight the results for how often words with "gi-" are actually used, the G is hard more often than soft.
gin, agile, giraffe, gist
print("The first rule of English spelling is " + english_spelling_rules[0]) **ERROR: index out of range**
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@mzh There are plenty of rules. Pity that they're all contradictory. That's because, as was once said on Usenet:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
When we do that, we tend to take a mutated version of the spelling and codify it as the correct one.
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@benjamin-hall Yeah, English is fun. Whenever I read people complaining about how this generation speaks terrible English, I ask if they prefer the original.
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@gurth said in GIF or JIF?:
how do folks on a forum like this say that name?
i ususally say it as Jyfe (kind of smashing gif and jif together phonetically) though i'll admit i do so exclusively because it annoys the other geeks at my workplace.
usually me saying that word causes a brief but vigorous NERF battle.
Which I, by virtue of having the largest NERF arsenal in the building, usually win.