Matt Bors on the dark and awful .GIF wars

Obviously they celebrate with jifts on Jilligan’s Island.

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If you can describe how you pronounce it the NYT can tell you your zip code.

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I have a bee in my bonnet about NaNoWriMo whenever the subject of pronouncing netty things comes up. It’s national novel rite-ing month, not national novel reet-ing month. Why the odd pronunciation?

Pronouncing with the hard “G” is also called “fixing it.” Evolution yo. If you value your opposable thumbs you’ll get with the program and leave that “j” crap in the 90’s.

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I mean I have never heard anyone pronounce .gif either gif [with an initial g-sound, such as in Glenda] or jif [with an initial j-sound, such as in Yolanda], only ever dzjif [with an initial dzj-sound, such as in Jenny].

I suppose it’s hard to use letters with multiple sounds to describe these sounds, and in English g and j rarely correspond to a j-sound. Izwara Rumiskons bokos sind unfrodeins.

Of course, it’s a hard g. Haven’t you heard of the phrase “Beware of geeks bearing gifs”?

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I’m totally pronouncing it Yiff from now on.

What you are calling a dzj sound is what I’d call a j sound. What you’re calling a j sound I’d call a y sound. But I’m not a linguist so I’m probably completely wrong.

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J – that is all.

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Jraffic Park.

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You are worst at grammar. That is all.

Since when did acronyms have to take the pronunciation from the words that give them their letters?

Is NATO pronounced Nah-to?

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Had a Compuserve account from the early 80’s to the mid 90’s and I believe I may have started using it with a VIC-20, if not that definitely C64.

[ahem]

I go with the “j” sound. Always have. always will.

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Some people do say NAT-zee presumably for similar reasons, but with an English bias. Shatner saying it that way in Patterns of Force still echoes in my mind. Maybe a Canadian thing though, like his version of “sabotage”…

or maybe its a jaypejj?

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I’m trying hard not to be snarky, because I’m a nerd too and I understand how satisfying it is to use jargon 100% of the time regardless of audience. I assume this is a distinction that is very useful in the study of phonetics, and that’s fine.

If you’re aiming to be understood outside the field of phonology, you should consider that the huge majority of English speakers will understand “a J-sound” to mean “that sound which is commonly associated, in English, with the letter J.” That sound is found at the beginning of Jenny (which has a J) but not Yolanda (which, you’ll note, doesn’t). If you’re speaking to laymen using jargon that means something dramatically different to laymen, it’s polite to define your terms first.

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Oh, I quite agree - my grammar is atrocious. My diction, however, is impeccable.
´The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.´

How do you pronounce iPhone or iMac?
According to the fellow who coined iMac, the “I” stands for internet…

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This is Jif http://www.unilever.com.au/brands-in-action/detail/Jif/304614/

Yeah. Too bad there isn’t actually a rule in English that requires or even suggests that letters in acronyms be pronounced based on the pronunciation of the words they were taken from.

The actual rules is “whoever makes up the acronym gets to decide how it’s pronounced”.

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You could just resolve to use IPA:

gem: d͡ʒɛm
gopher: ˈgoʊfɚ
ja (as in Deutsch): jaː
yellow: ˈjɛləʊ

And what’s this about using personal names as examples of proper pronunciation? That’s bound to lead to all sorts of misunderstandings.

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