An object lesson: one of the more popular GIFs of this century is an animated screengrab of an advertisement for Mexican food. This implies the kind of speaker uncertainty that may not lend itself to a "bandwagon effect", where one variant form quickly outpaces another. The GIF debate, while quietened, is not going away any time soon.Īccording to Google Trends data, searches for "GIF pronunciation" have risen steadily for the past six years. In Australia it seems to be a result of a certain type of didactic English instruction, and is mostly done in good humour.Īt times, though - as the linguist Nick Enfield has argued elsewhere - its adherents seem not to realise such a mindset privileges certain regional dialects, while arbitrarily invalidating the speech of others. This fascination with the sole correct pronunciation, especially for common words, astounds me. To my shock, I was told that this information was no kind of help, that I must "pick a side". Unfazed by their inability to consult any kind of dictionary, I offered that both had long been in use in Australian and British English. The other day, an ABC newsreader asked on social media how the word turmeric should be pronounced. Why should we pronounce GIF any differently to the start of a Germanic word like gift? Against reductive correctness Īnd besides - isn't analogy a good enough formative process for approaching speaker elicitation? G before the letters E, I or Y is realised as /ʤ/, elsewhere it is /g/.įrom such a rule, it would be reasonable to demand that the only correct pronunciation of GIF is with the so-called soft G, /ʤ/.īut such a rule isn't total - it can't account for anger, or borrowings from the Japanese ( geisha) or French ( margarine). Potential prescriptivists face a choice: where does that sit against the file format's original documentation, which specifies a JIF pronunciation, or Steve Wilhite's insistence that the OED is wrong?Īnd does Wilhite's position invalidate that of the Obama administration, who inexplicably waded into the debate around the same year? (For the record, they chose GIF with a hard G.)įor those who treat language like maths and demand logic from it, the following "rule" could be derived for English spelling: This pronunciation debate could get very interesting ( Supplied) GIF's pronunciation offers an interesting case study when it comes to locating correctness.Īs you might expect, dictionaries - including the Oxford English Dictionary - tend to list both pronunciation forms, for the not unstupid reason that both forms have been in use as long as the file format itself has. Should WYSIWYG - an abbreviation of What You See Is What You Get used to describe website editors - have a /z/ sound somewhere in it?Ĭompounding this problem, speakers of English are already likely to pronounce the first letter in GIF two different ways: as the "hard G" of gift, got, and gate, or the "soft G" of gin, gym, or gem.Īcronyms, being short, are less likely to have guide characters that help indicate how other letters should be pronounced - just as the e in guide elongates a preceding vowel, where supper's doubled consonant shortens one. exe, be said as EK-see or as an initialism? Pronouncing these out loud can naturally lead to arguments.
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