• renzev@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 days ago

    I personally pronounce it with a hard G even when talking about the mythical creature because that’s how it’s pronounced in most other languages that have a similar word. Anglos can go fuck themselves with their needlessly complicated phonetics.

    • Harvey656@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 days ago

      I have always pronounced git as get (mostly because of accent) bit I watched a video the other day, and they pronounced it as Jit and my whole world fell apart. Was I pronouncing it wrong? Are they dumb? Was this secretly a gif jiff issue?

        • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          9 days ago

          To be fair once you make a word from an acronym, it doesn’t really matter what the pronunciation of the individual words was.

          • gon [he]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            0·
            9 days ago

            Well, it’s not the P that’s read like an F, it’s PH that’s read like an F. If it was jpheg it would be read jfeg.

              • 5765313496@lemmy.world
                0·
                7 days ago

                I didn’t downvote either of you, but here is why I disagree. The P is inseparable from the H in this situation. I would pronounce the P as half of a PH if I could, but “puh” is nothing like the first half of the sound “phuh”.

                • Chronographs@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  0·
                  7 days ago

                  I’m just realizing that they must be gettinf the ph from the P in JPEG standing for Photographic. I’m guessing the argument is that gif is pronounced like gift (germanic root) vs giraffe (latin/italian) because graphics has a hard g. But if gif was a word there’s obviously some people who would pronounce it that was, if jpeg was a word, we probably wouldn’t say Jay-pehg but nobody would pronounce the p like a ph so there’s no need to resort to the component words of the acronym.

          • DrDystopia@lemy.lol
            0·
            9 days ago

            Maximum cleaning

            Minimum scrubbing

            I’ll never have to buy toilet paper again!

            Edit: Also, I like the taste of citrus so that’s nice too!

    • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      Except of course we did then and we do now. Too bad none of you ever looked at how G can be pronounced.

      • _cryptagion [he/him]@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        I understand that the letter G can make that sound. I am still saying, however, that the overwhelming vast majority of people pronounce it “gif” as in gift, and not “jiff” as in we’re not calling it that. stomp your feet as you will, it’s not gonna change anything.

        • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          9 days ago

          No the overwhelming majority of kids think its pronounced that way. The majority of us who were around when it was written know how its pronounced. How do we know? We know because the guy who wrote it told us.

          • Gerudo@lemmy.zip
            0·
            9 days ago

            I was around before gifs even existed. No one I knew ever pronounced it jif. It was always like gift. In fact, I never even heard any question of how it was pronounced well into the use of gifs.

            • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              9 days ago

              I was around before they existed as well. I remember reading a article about the new format and dialing into CompuServe in 1988 and downloading the first compiler and decoders for it. I remember how the article specifically showed the pronunciation. I know I say it correctly as the author and unisys intended. I remember when unisys was butthurt in 94 and tried to charge the whole world wide web for it and how that failed. I remember it all so it doesn’t matter if you or anyone else got it wrong.

              I didn’t.

          • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
            0·
            8 days ago

            We know because the guy who wrote it told us.

            The guy who first wrote “eiland” spelled it as such. Then some idiot put an ‘s’ on it as a stylistic choice to latinize a word that has no Latin root. Now if you spell it any way other than “island” you are wrong because that is the way to word is used and understood.

            Or, to put it another way, if you want to insist language is set in stone let me translate for you:

            Se mann þe ǣrest wrāt “eiland,” swā hine stæfode. Þā sum dysig mann an ‘s’ onlēde swā stīlcræft, tō Lǣden sprǣce þæt word þe næfþ nān Lǣden rōt. Nū gif þū hine stæfian on ǣnige wīsan būtan “island,” þū bist wōh, forþām þæt is sēo wīs þe þæt word is gebrocen and understonden.

            • Soupbreaker@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              8 days ago

              Se mann þe ǣrest wrāt “eiland,” swā hine stæfode. Þā sum dysig mann an ‘s’ onlēde swā stīlcræft, tō Lǣden sprǣce þæt word þe næfþ nān Lǣden rōt. Nū gif þū hine stæfian on ǣnige wīsan būtan “island,” þū bist wōh, forþām þæt is sēo wīs þe þæt word is gebrocen and understonden.

              See, if that person that insists on using thorns in all their comments really committed like this, I think they’d get less flak, and more buy-in.

          • ManosTheHandsOfFate@lemmy.world
            0·
            9 days ago

            I first heard it in pronounced “jif” from a guy in my college dorm in the mid 90s. I’ve just pronounced it that way every since. Is it there a generation gap in how it’s pronounced? I do catch some flak from my kids about how I pronounce it.

            • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              9 days ago

              Sometime around 2010 was the first time I encountered someone who was foaming at the mouth certain about how I was saying it wrong. Considering by that time I had know about the file format for twenty years I dismissed their error. Its really funny watching all these people making fools out of themselves in defense of getting it wrong. The very first article I read about the format specifically showed the pronunciation. All in all I think its stupid how they will not or can not accept they got it wrong. Instead they call me a boomer or make some lame argument that the author and the company that came up with it. The company that owned it don’t get to decide what to call it. I dive in every time this comes up as its entertaining watching all these ‘fetuses’ get it wrong.

              • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
                0·
                8 days ago

                I encountered someone who was foaming at the mouth certain about how I was saying it wrong

                And here you are. The circle is complete.

              • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                0·
                9 days ago

                Ah yes, jraphics, it makes total sense now thank you sensei you are a bastion of knowledge teaching us young bucks

                Quick edit: you really got everyone good with the fetus line, there sure are some ruffled feathers lawl way to go champ

                • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  0·
                  9 days ago

                  I was young in the late 80’s and it was all new. I had a IBM AT, a bell 300 baud modem and a bluebox. The internet wasn’t really much at that point. We used tymnet nodes to access compuserve and some BBS. It was the best shit ever. Gif was a incredible improvement over bmp and tiff. I had two 20meg hard drives and converting to gif saved me a huge amount of space :).

                  The only reason anyone knows of the gif format is due to unisys backing off their royalty push in 94. A few years before there was a compression standard. The files were .arc. They made a big play at getting the BBS systems in the country to pay for using it and in less than a month they all switched to zip. You have of course heard of zip but arc died a quick death for being pushy. It was just a few years before unisys went after mosaic. It didn’t get very far because it triggered a similar action and it was clear gif wasn’t going to get much. They went after a few corporations but largely left the fledgling browsers alone.

                  No one questioned the name when they presented it. No one argued it because it wasn’t a problem. This whole pronunciation thing is really quite silly. It goes right along side other silly things such as which way the toilet paper goes on a roller. When kids these days say it wrong I leave it uncommented but invariably when I pronounce it correctly in a crowd of them one will attempt to correct me and trigger a “boomersplain” of exactly why they are incorrect. I give them the history of it until their eyes glaze over. Which is also fun.

                  Only I’m not a boomer. I’m a member of the meh generation.

    • Zaphod@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      9 days ago

      What about HiFi though? The Fi comes from fidelity, yet it’s pronounced like the fi in finite.
      English is weird

      • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        You can start pronouncing it correctly. There are so many English accents, why not have one that pronounces words how they should be pronounced?

  • Cevilia (she/they/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    If they’d wanted us to call Itchio Itch, they shouldn’t have called it Itchio.

    Similarly, if they’d wanted us to call Gnome Ganome, they shouldn’t have called it Gnome.

    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      9 days ago

      Maybe English should just get rid of the stupid “the first consonant is silent when two consonants form the beginning of a word” rule tbf.

      It’s a skill issue to mispronounce loan words (like gnome, pterodactyl or psychology).

        • rtxn@lemmy.worldM
          0·
          9 days ago

          I was already an adult when I learned that “salmon” is supposed to be pronounced as “sammon”.

            • Emotional (he/him)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              0·
              7 days ago

              ah, I was wondering because, in comparison to my native tongue (French), I’ve found English significantly more intuitive. I may be biased though, or French may just be another mongrel of a language 😅

              My uneducated feeling so far is that most languages weren’t developed with particularly logical rules, and rules were added retroactively, and as such, most languages are ugly amalgamations, but English gets some of the worst rep because of its dominance on the internet.

        • Greddan@feddit.org
          0·
          9 days ago

          That’s just every language once you get into it. English is a fairly standard north germanic language. There’s been a lot of mythology built around it over the years which often leads to misunderstandings, especially from monolinguals who simply have nothing to compare to.

            • Greddan@feddit.org
              0·
              8 days ago

              The German language is ironically one of the weirder Germanic languages. When I say North Germanic languages I mostly mean what is now known as Scandinavian languages (and sometimes Dutch depending on who you ask).

                • Greddan@feddit.org
                  0·
                  8 days ago

                  I think they’ve been on the ball with spelling reforms as the language has evolved. The last one as recently as in 1996. English has no central authority for spelling, making such reforms much harder to implement. Conservatives are of course, like always, a problem. Being against any and all spelling reform. The main argument seem to be that it makes it harder for people to read really old texts in their original form. Which for some reason makes spelling and speach drifting apart worth it. I known Swedish conservative pseudo-intellectuals often praise the English for it’s lack of reform.

      • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
        0·
        9 days ago

        Snail, small, three, press, change. I could keep going.

        I’ve never heard of that rule. There are a few combos that are basically always that way though: pt, gn, and kn come to mind.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          9 days ago

          And then there are the cases where two consonants combine to form another sound entirely: ph, ch, sh, th.

  • otacon239@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 days ago

    I feel like if I’m pronouncing any Linux package for the first time, there’s some tongue-in-cheek “um, actually” trap hidden just around the corner for some self-righteous geek to correct you with a big smirk on their face because they get to feel smarter, which I used to be guilty of, but try to cut back on as much as I can these days.

    It’s a fun joke at first, but I kind of got tired of it after a while, and just decided that politely educating in context and ignoring it otherwise feels way nicer.

    • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 days ago

      I’ve never met anyone who took this seriously in real life. Like they know what you mean and will joke about the pronunciation. But I read a lot more about these holy wars online.

  • mmmm@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    9 days ago

    I have absolutely no idea how “Linux” is supposed to be pronounced. True story.

        • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
          0·
          9 days ago

          goddamnit. You can lead an american to water, but you can’t make them drink. Yes, technically speaking, in english he would pronounce his name as “Lie-nus”. The correct pronunciation of the word that is his name is Li-nus. Some people choose to adapt their name to the audience they are talking to so that the audience has an easier time understanding or saying their name. But the actual way that name is pronounced correctly is different than the manners they are presenting.

          Based on how he pronounces his name in his native tongue (and a neighboring country) the correct pronunciation , if you are looking for it, would be Li-nuks. If you want to pronounce it using the compromise he is kindly offering to people who can’t pronounce anything properly, then you should call it Lie-nuks, but then again, you might as well pronounce it however the fuck you want and keep being wrong; the point of asking how you should pronounce something is to improve yourself and the way you say words.

          Source : I had my name butchered whenever people try to pronounce it. I go by shortened versions that avoid the “difficult” part.

          • DragonOracleIX@lemmy.ml
            0·
            9 days ago

            I don’t whats worse, having your name constantly butchered, or having to deal with a copywrite dispute with the 3 other people in the room with the same name for ownership of it.

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      I pronounce it the usual way, but in the back of my mind (I keep forgetting to look into it), I’ve wondered if the “I” was originally intended to be pronounced like “Linus”.

      • fitgse@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        9 days ago

        In early versions of Linux when manually setting up your sound card, Redhat came with a test audio clip of Linus Torvolds saying “I province Linux as Linux”. Even though it is named after him he did not pronounce it like his name: Ly-nix.

    • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      I was hoping I wasn’t alone. I pronounced it genome for years before some neck beard took me to task for it. They also were mad at me for pronouncing CentOS like DOS (centahs rather than cent oh ess).

      • antimongo@lemmy.world
        0·
        9 days ago

        I also used to pronounce Gnome this way.

        I’ll add I used to say “deb eye ann”, for Debian

        And used to say “uh lie us”, for alias

        I didn’t have a lot of people to talk about Linux with lol

        • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          9 days ago

          To be fair, Debian is a portmanteau of Debra and Ian so most people don’t pronounce it the way Ian Murdock intended.

      • ngdev@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        a gigantic and gargantuan achievement that enabled memes that make you giddy when you get the gist of their jokes

        but yeah who cares what the dude says, language evolves and its pronounced gif now

    • ultrafastsloth@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 days ago

      As a non-native english speaker who thought I had finally grasped the english language can confirm I, in fact, hadn’t (I pronounce gnome as “guhnome” also as in “garden guhnome”, I had no idea)

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        9 days ago

        How do you pronounce gnocci, gnat, etc? They may start with a ‘g’ but the proper pronunciation is just /n/.

        • ultrafastsloth@lemmy.world
          0·
          9 days ago

          I know to pronounce the italian gnocchi as ñoki (like it was also mentioned above) but believe it or not, people here pronounce it with like “guh-notchi” same in “guh-nat” It’s just some Slavic languages (I cant speak for all) pronounce every letter in words, so there is this tendency. PS: thanks for reminding me, the “g” in gnat is silent xD

          • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
            0·
            8 days ago

            My mother tongue very rarely completely mutes the sound of letters. More often, they are just deadened. So I can’t help but pronounce a little bit of G at the beginning of those words.