O.k.
Comment on It's canon now. And so is a certain image format.
MeanEYE@lemmy.world 10 months agoNeither did the author of graphic format. GIF is not a word, but initialism, like NSA, FBI, NASA, IBM, etc. And there are specific rules how they are read and pronounced.
OldManBOMBIN@lemmy.world 10 months ago
dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 10 months ago
NASA is an acronym, not an initialism. And guess how the last letter of NASA is pronounced versus how the A in the corresponding word is pronounced. Ah vs Uh.
MeanEYE@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Irrelevant comment to the discussion at hand as the matter is not set in stone in English language. More to the point it doesn’t change the fact how GIF is pronounced. Even if you consider it an acronym it’s still a form of abbreviation and not a word on its own with known heritage, hence the general rules on how to pronounce letter
g
do not apply.Had the word originate from French part of the English dictionary (like gin, giraffe, etc.) then
g
is pronounced asj
before vowelse
andi
and would make sense. But Germanic words (such as gift, geese) still use hardg
. So applying normal rules is pointless, since English has no such thing.In short, it’s pronounced whatever the way people pronounce it. End of story.