Do You Pronounce it GIF or GIF?

[dlevere]

So. Whether you like it or not, when you say the word G-I-F, especially on the Internet, people are gonna talk about it.

Some will correct you, some will correct the people correcting you, it’s the same conversation every time. Over and over and over.

Which is why Mike proposed a third pronunciation way back when: Zhaif, or in the IPA: ʒaɪf.

Because if you can’t beat them, leave town and set up camp in the wilderness.

But really though, what is it about this one word that has people up in arms about the “right” way to pronounce it? There are plenty of other words that have differing pronunciations across cultures, borders and languages.

So why is GIF the word people go to war for? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

[bungholio]

This is one of the things that as always makes me look at humanity with a blank stare of disappointment. The correct answer is who cares which way you pronounce it, because thanks to the people involved with setting the "official" standards of how to pronounce every word in their dictionaries and just taking any half-assed jumble of letters people threw their way, I refuse to correct people on this stuff. The people that need correcting is every tard involved with setting these standards, the alphabet needs a rewrite and it needs to purely set and follow rules without exception, and then when every teacher in school tells you to "sound it out" for a written word you've never heard spoken before, you'll "sound it out" on what you see letters are and be 100% right every time and we no longer need to teach spelling beyond 1st grade and this embarrassing spelling Bs can die because at this point spelling is purely memorization because the rules are borderline worthless and apply incorrectly to most words that have more than 1 syllable. I hate the written English language and we are stuck with this.

I've argued with people and heard their "but the dictionary is a mix of German and blah blah blah". I don't care where it's from, thank you douches who set the standards. While we're doing that how about we just take the letters from their own languages and use them instead? Their written language is probably better than ours, it'd be hard to be worse than the written English language.

I also don't care if "but that word's from another language and that's why it's spelled weird". No it isn't, it's because our spelling rules are so bad that over 90% of the words don't even fit the rules.

We need more letters and no giving letters multiple sounds or combining them with other letters to make special sounds, a full rewrite. This stuff needs an immediate rewrite and no exceptions to letter pronunciations and no throwing in a bunch of extra letters and then mocking people for pronouncing those extra letters because if you don't want them pronounce then don't put them in the word. We especially don't need 4 letters that contain the same sound: c + k + q + x. "c" is always going to sound like "k" or "s", but I see no single letter for the "ch" sound so we can first make "c" the special one to change. It'll never happen though.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

English is listed as the single most complicated language on Earth...for non-English speakers to learn. The most complicated language for English-speakers is frequently listed as Japanese or Korean (due to all the complex rules for conjugation).

However, the true record holder would have to be a dying language known as Basque, spoken in northwestern Spain. This language has such a complicated sentence structure that they have a legend where the Devil never visits northwestern Spain because it took him seven years just to figure out how to say "hello".

[bungholio]

7 years to say hello sounds bad, but reading a written language that 90% of the time ignores its own rules and at the same time there's not 1 human being who's ever spelled and pronounced every last word correctly ever is ridiculous too, the Devil's probably still saying "Screw this". Doesn't even deserve to be called an alphabet, even Japan's syllabus fits the rules of the alphabet better than English and they aren't even an alphabet.

[dlevere]

The Basque are indigenous to, and primarily inhabit, the Basque Country, a region that spans the westernmost Pyrenees in adjacent parts of northern Spain and southwestern France.


Schematic dialect areas of Basque. Light-colored dialects are extinct.

The Basque language is spoken by 27% of Basques in all territories. Of these, 663,035 are in the Spanish area of the Basque Country and the remaining 51,100 are in the French portion.

[Pyriel]

Computer engineer trying to solve interpersonal communications issues.

English doesn't have a lot of hard rules for spelling and pronunciation, so much as it has some soft guidelines derived from the lexicon where if you put them on a pie chart, the biggest slice would be the guideline working, but it may or may not be more than half the pie. There have been attempts over the years to retroactively introduce rules, and even cull the language, but they never succeeded anymore than attempts to switch to base 12 numbering, or heavens help us, base 16/"tonal".

Aside from Esperanto, I don't think people have ever really sat down with the idea to construct a language that conforms to a set of rules. Languages just develop organically as a function of how and where they're used, and the "rules" developed later when formalism emerged as somebody had to try to teach it, and look intelligent while they use it.

I'm not saying English isn't confusing, and the exact opposite of what someone would make if they set out to design a language. You just seem to be seeing design where there never really was one, or at least there was never a single, cohesive design. It's very much like an organic city. People built their houses wherever, then built roads to where they needed to go, following whatever course seemed best. Sometime later they became paved and part of a larger system as the city grew, and now nobody who has lived there for less than 5 years can find anything without a map. Roads change names three times in five miles, and making four right turns leads to another state rather than to where you started. Similarly, the English we have today is a result of cultures meeting, invasions, and shifts in political power, as well as people constructing neologisms from whatever common and foreign roots seemed appropriate at the time, and a host of other factors. Its development wasn't by any means clean, or well thought-out as a whole.

[bungholio]

I know it wasn't a well thought out thing if was even thought out at all, and it bugs me when I see people correcting the spelling of others in a language that doesn't bother to make sense on how to spell. I see it all the time and consider it absurd, usually wherever I see people misspelling things I praise it because it looks more correct than the correct version a lot of times. I can't believe we have spelling Bs. It's a thing that shouldn't exist. A written language shouldn't be so confusing that nobody can easily and effortlessly nail things just by guessing. I always think of how stupid it was throughout school just learning how to spell words. Reasonless memorization is how it's done, and after a while you can take a bit of a guess but never be surprised at just random letters thrown in or other random letters just plainly not there.

It really bugs me wherever I go. I get to see it at my workplace where I'll cringe every time I hear somebody smugly laugh and say "I can't believe X person doesn't know how to spell X word." It's a complaint that shouldn't even exist. I see a lot of people put a lot of stress and focus on spelling in every workplace and consider it the biggest problem that shouldn't be a problem. I often see people that have English as a 2nd language and spelling isn't easy, and then a workplace starts focusing on their spelling and I feel the urge to stop them with a simple phrase I wish would snap them out of this mindset that something that placed no importance on making sense should not be something people try to enforce the rules on, that phrase being "Who gives a shit!"



If u wont tu spel in a way that luks this gufy, no problem. It luks wird at furst but yu r reeding this eesily. If it's this eesy tu take a ges and it sounds rite, and is still eesily reedible, hu kers?



Instead it'll forever be a very important workplace thing to spell "correctly" because people are full of crap with their "professional" act. Professionals spell every word perfectly every time. I hate the sight of people being mocked over spelling. It puts a massive halt on things that matter. Look at all of the wonderful online conversations that start as something interesting and then 1 spelling or grammar nazi pops in and points out a misspelled word in a sentence and then that's basically the end of the conversation, because people stop and make a big issue out of "your" and "you're" and everything else. People try to use proper spelling as a measuring tool like it's supposed to have something to do with intelligence when it's mostly meaningless memorization. If I didn't see so many people stopping to point out spelling errors throughout life as if they mattered, I wouldn't care, but it's a scourge that's everywhere.


I really do hate the written English language. So many people just sit there and argue over proper grammar and spelling, what they need is a Men In Black memory-erasing pen to blast them into the stone ages because if you're stopping to make an issue out of it there's already something wrong because you don't know how to tell the difference between things that matter in life and things that mattered so little that the people involved in making it were just like "'Or Derve'? You spell that like 'h-o-r-s d'-o-e-u-v-r-e'? Perfect!"

I keep seeing people judge other people based on this stuff, it enrages me. They will evaluate a human being's entire life based on this stuff. All I ever see it used as is a tool people use to strike others down with.

[Pyriel]

It's one of those shorthand tricks for assessing the qualities of a person. Everybody does it to some extent, and, yeah, it can be annoying. I hope most of your examples aren't people you know well, and you're just extrapolating from Facebook and Youtube comments. If I used the wrong form of "there" with someone whose thoughts I actually value, I'd have to hurt them if they used it as an excuse for completely ignoring the substance of something I'd said. I've never had somebody correct me at work. Although, I have done my "Skiller correction" routine a time or two. That's when somebody misspells something and then sends a correction that's also wrong. I will point that out, but only because I figure if somebody is going to take the time and trouble fix their mistakes, the fixes ought to actually be correct.

I have to imagine if I spelled terribly on a résumé it would hurt my chances, but I'll likely never know about that. HR types who are at the point of looking at spelling are probably inundated with enough candidates that they're just looking for a way to bin a few without having to put much work in.

Hell, look at languages like Chinese and Japanese. You can almost avoid the problem of spelling in those languages, but it's replaced with a complex system of radicals and character combinations, and your ability to recognize more characters is often used as a gauge of intelligence and education.