You just had to open up old wounds, didn’t you Trebek? How GIF is pronounced is a sore subject for many. It is the internet version of the War of the Roses — It’s pitted brother against brother, mother against daughter. Friendships have been shattered, families split in twain.
And you had the gall to bring it all back here, in Final Jeopardy:
You want to know how to pronounce GIF Trebek? Like this:
God forbid, next you’ll be going around asking how “doge” is pronounced.
Jeopardy via Viral Viral Video.
Comments
11 responses to “Jeopardy Tackles 2013’s Biggest Question: How Do You Pronounce ‘GIF’?”
I’d love to know how languages other than English pronounce .gif. Is it only in English where there is a dispute?
I can’t really even consider it a dispute on the one side you have the people who pronounce it gif and on the other side you have the idiots who for no explainable reason think it should be pronounced jiff. Until we live in a universe where we pronounce Graphical as Jraphical there is no reason to do so.
It was always pronounced with a hard “G” back in the day, not sure what bright spark started with the the “Jiff” BS.
the guy who invented it stated that he always wanted it to be pronounced jiff, which is in my opinion stupid, if he wanted it pronounced that way the extension should of been jif not gif.
Its basically like saying ‘Hey I have just invented this new thing, its called a lop, but its not pronounced that way its pronounced bop, just because I’m a pretentious wanker, who thinks the rules of the English language shouldn’t be used logically’
so by that logic youre saying that everyone with the name George should respell their name Jeorge from now on just to save the ‘logic’ in the english language? the english language has the worst pronunciation logic on earth.
There are words that start with G but are pronounced with a ‘J’ sound. Eg: Germany, Gigantic, Gypsy, Gem, Gibberish, Gyroscope. At least there is a precedent there, it’s not something he made up. It’s rare yes, but it still happens.
On the other hand, I can’t think of a single word where a L is pronounced as an B.
Both points are valid, in my opinion.
The main problem for me is that it’s not (just) a name, it stands for Graphics Interchange Format or something along those lines. Therefore, people naturally assume it takes the hard “G”.
The problem is that it’s both a name and an acronym, because Unix/etc developers just love little tricks like that (see: WINE, or Wine Is Not An Emulator.)
When your chosen name uses different pronunciation than the acronym, you just confuse everyone.
But there are no English words that start with gif- other than words relating to “gift” and it is pronounced with a hard g. And people’s names like Gifford, and they are also pronounced with hard g.
Gif is also an actual word according to Scrabble and other word games. It is apparently an archaic word for if. I would love to know how that was pronounced, my bet is with a hard g.
So you can’t just decide to change the pronunciation of an existing word on a whim.
And pronouncing it with j confuses it with the other graphical format .jif and .jiff.
My point about the name is referring to the fact that names aren’t always (in fact, most aren’t) English, and different locales have different ways to pronounce them (see Juan, which isn’t pronounced like I initially thought.)
In English, we don’t have words that have a silent J as in Juan, but you have to use that locale’s pronunciation of that name to say it correctly.
This is the problem I see with “Gif”, if it’s a name, it can have whatever pronunciation is correct in that person’s mind – after all, the sound of the name came first and alphabets are just a way of recording those sounds.
But since it’s an acronym, the hard “G” is always the way I thought it would be pronounced because that’s how you pronounce the words being used, ie clearly targeting the English locale.
Using the starting sounds of the words that make up the acronym don’t work either. World Trade Organization’s “General Agreement on Trade in Services” which is shortened to GATS, is not pronounced JATS even though the G comes from General.
“It looks like this is my lucky day, I’ll take ‘The Rapists’ for $200!”
Maybe everyone should just listen to the person that created it instead of being English Nazis about it.
I don’t know what all the debate is about when it is a grammatical rule that a “g” followed by an “e”, “i” or “y” makes a “j” noise. eg. giraffe, gigolo etc. It is Jiff.
Just like when you give a gift to your girlfriend after she goes to the gynaecologi- oh, wait.
“I’ll take Anal Bum Cover for $500.”
Jif is a cleaning product, Gif is a file format that is used way too much on websites.