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From: bmanevit@dolphin.upenn.edu (Bilbo Baggins)
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art
Subject: Re: GIF prononciation.  Word from the CREATOR!
Date: 31 Dec 1994 06:15:14 GMT
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Matthew Z. Rascoff (Matthew_Z._Rascoff@nyo.com) wrote:
: i was one of the people at compuserve who wrote up the gif format. it is
: pronounec witha soft "g"


: sorry folks, this ends it


No. I'm sorry, Matt. This ends nothing.  When you create something and 
send it out into the great wide world, you of necessity give up some of 
your power over it.

Just because you helped make it up doesn't mean you get to say how it's 
pronounced.  You may get to have a pretty weighty opinion, but that's 
it.

You pronounced it _J_IF ?  Good for you. You're wrong (IMHO).  I know that's 
pretty staunchly stated, but if you take those letters in that order and 
show it to someone who has never heard of a computer, let alone this 
debate, and they're going to come up with _G_IF (hard G).  Them's the breaks.

**IF** the G had stood for something pronounced originally with the 
soft-G, then, okay, maybe, possibly, there could be some argument for the 
_J_IF way of saying it.  But that's not the case.

As it stands now, there have been a number of solidly based arguments in 
this thread in favor of the hard G sound and only two flavors of 
arguments in favor of the soft G sound.

The first of those, the one that goes "The originators said it with a 
soft G!" can't hold.  If I think Eliot's _Prufrock_ is a great work of 
art, and enough people agree with me, then it goes into the canon, even 
if Eliot comes to me personally and sais, "it's crap."  Okay. Bad 
example.  But you know what I mean. (I just got off a plane)

The second flavor of argument pretty much only finds examples of 
exceptions to the various 'general-rule' approaches to the hard G 
argument.  The problem with that is that all the exceptions are either 
specifically reasoned exceptions *or* archaic words that represent the 
state of their pronunciation when they were imported to whatever language 
they were in before English.

The hard G sound makes more sense.  The hard G sound is the natural 
reaction to the letters GIF in that order.  Your OPINION notwithstanding, 
I'm on the hard G side and strongly so.

This post does NOT end it, folks.


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;) (with a wink and a smile) -- Ben Manevitz.
Pax Vobiscum (b.n.t.m.)         bmanevit@dolphin.upenn.edu
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"The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life.  Its 
history is the history of the moral development of the race.  The 
practice of it, in spite of popular jests, tends to make good citizens...."
                                         --Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
                     _The_Path_of_the_Law_, 10 Harv.L.Rev 457, 458 (1897)
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