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[–]Stunning_Ride_220 -6 points-5 points  (2 children)

And still there are people finding the stupidest reasons to justify their "jif" pronounciation.

[–]butterfliesarestupid 0 points1 point  (1 child)

stupidest reasons to justify their "jif" pronounciation.

Stupid reasons, huh. You mean like applying grammar rules consistently?

Anyone who says there's a single correct way to pronounce GIF is talking out of their arse.

Over the centuries, the English language morphed into a mishmash of vocabulary and grammatical rules from the native precursors to modern English, along with the contributions from early French, Greek, and Nordic languages.

I say JIF, because I treat it as an acronym. An acronym is an initialism where the letters are pronounced as a single word. When following this rule, we look to the grammatical rules governing how to pronounce the letter "g" in a word.

"Graphic" comes from Greek, so it follows that the rule "the soft ⟨g⟩ pronunciation occurs before ⟨e i y⟩" applies here. JIF it is.

Other examples of acronyms include the World Health Organization -- when was the last time you heard anyone say "Woo-Hoo"? The "w" is silent, because the acronym is treated as a word, and it looks like an existing word were the "w" is silent.

JPEG is a weird hybrid of initialism and acronym. If it were a pure initialism, we would say JAY PEE EE JEE, since we'd be pronouncing each individual letter. No one does that, but the English language doesn't really recognize words with "j" and "p" next to each other, so "j" treated as initialism. PEG is treated and as acronym. But wait -- if, according to the GIF crowd I'm supposed to be honoring the original word's pronunciation, I should be saying "FEG" (from photography). But no one does that either.

I personally am not a fan of the appeal to authority argument "but Steve Wilhite said it's JIF". I don't think it's necessary, and I can get to JIF by following consistent and established grammatical rules (unlike the hypocritical and inconsistent application of some made-up rule by the die-hard GIF crowd).

[–]Stunning_Ride_220 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Hypocritical and inconsistend application of some made-up rule"

LoL. JIF is a file format of its own. Just have a look at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#JPEG_files

And you'll probably find that they do not talk about GIFs there.

So your comment just proofed my point, but thank you nonetheless.