#a proper linguistic can certainly explain it better but this is my layman understanding of it

[carriagelamp]

Okay I'm going to be the annoying asshole who's going to be pedantic -- I'm not making an argument one way or another on how you pronounce "gif" but I am going to gripe about why this specific gif gets my goat

English is basically, at it's miserable black heart, a frankenstein language. Thanks to a lot of assorted conquering, English as we know it is made up of the desecrated corpses of a lot of other languages; in this case I'm specifically focusing on the Germanic bits and the French bits.

In French, the standard grammar rule is that if a G is followed by an I or an E, it will be pronounced as a soft G ("j"). Anything else, and it's pronounced as a hard G. It's also why we have words like: Gentle, Giraffe, Giant, Germ, Gym, etc etc, that we pronounced with a soft J. Those are all words we got from French, and so they follow the French linguistic rule. If the G is followed by an A, O, U, or any constant, then yes it would be pronounced as a hard G.

Then you have words like "Give". It has an I but doesn't followed the rule! That's because Give has a germanic root, and doesn't follow the French rule about softening G's.

Everything in that gif is cherrypicked, they either are french words that are followed by something other than I/E, or else they're non-French words that don't use that rule. English is a shitshow and we have a bunch of different linguistic conventions!

So, can you pronounce it "GIF" with a hard G? Yes, absolutely. You're borrowing the hard G from Graphic. Makes sense.

So, can you pronounce it "GIF" with a soft G? Yes, absolutely. The G is followed by an I and you're following a basic English convention, it would feel intuitive to pronounce it like that!

So, can you say Jolden, Jalaxy, Juardian, or any of the other dumb as fucking dirt examples in the gif above? No because that actively BREAKS all conventional pronunciation rules and you sound like a fucking idiot for suggesting it.

Let's settle this.... Once and for all!

Reblog to start a riot.