Here's an idea.
Every argument for pronouncing G-I-F is wrong.
And that's OK.
Recently, I was talking to someone.
And I said oriented, as in let's get oriented.
My interlocutor responding said orientated,
which before you get all judgy and if we're
to treat the dictionary as an authority of some kind,
orientated is an acceptable alternative to oriented.
Our conversation lasted five minutes.
Me saying oriented.
He saying orientated.
Neither of us acknowledging the difference.
Both knowing exactly what the other meant.
Just how like my girlfriend is English and says "to-mah-to,"
but I say "to-mat-to."
And after many years, we continually
decide to not call the whole thing off.
(SINGING) Oh, let's call the whole thing off.
Zero flame, calm civility.
This is the dream that I have for zhaif-- gif-- jif.
Today we're going to talk about the G-I-F pronunciation debate.
And how every argument for pronouncing it the way that you
like, super flawed.
But that's OK.
First though, some oft requested back story about zhaif.
So whether you like it or not, when you say the word G-I-F,
especially on the internet, especially
on camera on the internet, people
are going to talk about it.
Some will correct you.
Some will correct the people correcting you.
And it is the same conversation every time.
And y'all, it is boring, which is why I proposed a third
pronunciation way back when.
From now on, I'm going to pronounce it zhaif.
They're animated zhaifs.
Zhaif life let's people who want to get mad feel righteous,
hard G or soft G alike.
So it is in fact uniting.
And it lets people who don't care stand back and laugh.
And every time I've said it since, the response
has been remarkable.
And a perfect example of Poe's Law.
Upset pedants raging because they think zhaif
is how I believe the acronym G-I-F is naturally pronounced.
But this brings us to a question.
How did I arrived at the pronunciation
zhaif for this word?
The answer involves fish.
A late 19th century orthography joke
first made by William Ollier, often incorrectly attributed
to George Bernard Shaw, source, demonstrates
how phonetically messy and contextually dependent
English is by proposing an alternate spelling for the word
fish.
The argument goes, you could spell fish
with the G-H from enough, the O from women,
and the T-I from nation.
G-H-O-T-I, fish.
Zhaif is similar, though the sounds to letters relationship
is reversed.
It's G is uncommon in English, but it's sort of
like the S in casual or vision.
A voiced palate alveolar sibilant is what it's called.
In IPA, that's represented by this symbol
and spelled phonetically with a ZH.
It's related to the D-G sound from judgment and fledgling,
though it is different.
Really, I just went to an IPA chart
to find the sound between the G of gif and the J of jif.
And what I found was a sound that I know from the words
zywiec and Zizek.
Zzhh.
The I of G-I-F in zhaif became the I sound from words
like giants, title, and vile.
Just a cause trouble really, since there
is parity for the sound between gif and jif.
You know what they say.
If you can't beat them, leave town and set up
camp in the wilderness.
Maybe I should have also borrowed the F from of
and made it zhaiv.
Zhaif, like G-H-O-T-I for fish, provides an opportunity
to laugh at and use the insane contingency of the English
language.
And don't worry, we're not talking about other languages
pretty soon.
Because seriously, whatever your argument
is for pronouncing G-I-F the way you do, it is contingent.
I'll explain.
But first we're going to put on some soothing music
to hopefully calm all the pronunciation jimmies
that we're about to rustle.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Item number one.
When you say jif, someone says it's not "j-raphics"
interchange format.
If what we're saying is that gif is correct
because graphic is pronounced with a "guh," that's fine.
As long as you're also going to follow suit with other acronyms
and pronounced scuba as sc-uh-ba and laser
as l-ah-ser, which probably you're not.
And that's OK.
Item number two.
You say gif and someone says, um,
gift is pronounced with a hard G. True.
But gin and ginger are said with soft G's.
There are remarkably few words that
begin with G-I-F in English.
My copy of the OED has mostly gift compounds.
But it's unfair to claim "juh" is
totally unnatural for a word beginning with GI.
This argument also works in reverse.
Giant, jibbering, and giraffe are pronounced with a J sound.
But then what about gizzards, girlfriend, and gimble,
and so on and so forth until literally the end of time.
And item number three.
You say gif.
And someone says, but the creator said it was jif.
So funny story, Morgan and I were actually in the room
when Steve Wilhite made his proclamation that it
should be pronounced jif.
It was awesome.
And if you want to say it that way because he says you should,
that is rad.
I respect that just like you respect Steve Wilhite's
authority.
However, a beauty of language is that in many,
if not most situations, and pronunciation chief amongst
them, usage, custom, and community are also authorities,
which is why I say "to-may-to," but Molly says "to-mah-to."
It's how awful came to mean something bad.
How "ray-tion" became ration.
How "quan-dairy" became quandary.
And also how the entire sound of the English language
shifted after the invention of the printing press.
Shameless plug for an episode of my podcast
where I described how and why that happened.
Boop.
In the case of G-I-F, if you're going to pronounce it
how the creator does because you feel that's how words should be
pronounced, then there are a whole bunch
of other words coined by John Milton or William Shakespeare,
for example, who coined some 859 English words between them
that you'll probably have to say rather differently
so that your position on jif isn't arbitrary.
But also, hey, that's OK if it's arbitrary.
We can admit that different pronunciations feel
natural to different people for reasons
beyond consistency and logic, as language, especially English,
often is.
By comparison, many other languages
have significantly more consistent pronunciation rules.
After conducting some very informal Twitter research,
source, it would seem most speakers of Portuguese, Czech,
German, Swedish, and Russian tend towards gif.
This is also technically the case in English.
A majority of English speakers say gif.
A vast majority in the UK.
In Italy and the Philippines, jif.
In Spanish and Dutch, maybe hif.
But also maybe gif because that's
how it's understood to be said in English.
And weirdly, gif is technically a loanword from English.
In French and Danish, the same controversy as English.
Gif versus jif.
Oh, and in Spanish, there may be some small jif outcropping.
Meaning that they have hif, jif, and gif.
German could also go either way, depending upon who you're with.
Even though according to the rules
it would have to be a hard G sound.
So that's is mostly gif.
Same with Russian, which also has
the popular diminutive gifka.
Oh.
And in Brazilian Portuguese, it might be gifi.
Huh.
About that consistency.
A while back, Andy Baio made his modest proposal
that jif is the format and gif is the culture.
But it may be that the culture and format are inseparable.
Wherever the format goes, its culture follows.
But it would seem as Dwight Silverman wrote
for the "Seattle PI," all pronunciation is local.
Even if the concepts and languages
which represent them are global.
So whether you're signifier is gif, jif, zhaif, gifi, hif,
or gifka, the signified is always
a piece of media and something about yourself.
Pronunciation has a long, complex, and well-worn history
of marking personal traits.
Location, background, and in many ways, status.
And gif is no different.
Which leads us to ask, if pronunciation encodes this info
into many words, why jif?
Why is it the pronunciation beach people go to war on?
PNG is meant to be pronounced ping,
but most people spell it out.
No torches or pitchforks.
EXE is spelled, said exey, and even exec.
There's even relative peace between
J-PEG and J-P-G pronouncers.
The stakes for zhaif seem so much higher.
Why?
I think because Andy was on to something.
It's because there is gif culture.
Or there is culture, and jifs, as such, play a role in it.
More so than J-PEGs or PNGs.
More as zhaifs, specifically I mean.
PNGs and JPEGs are often just photos, or pictures, or pics.
Executables are Word, Chrome, or "Stephen's Sausage Roll,"
not the Chrome executable.
A moving, looping, silent image of Rihanna
isn't anything other than a gif.
And if you told me it where some other file format,
I would be shocked.
I would say, no, no, no.
That's a GIF.
Like Kleenex, Xerox, and Post-it,
their name is their format and vice versa.
Which I suppose raises a side question.
If zhaif is format and culture, may we eventually call things
or practices gifs, which technologically aren't?
I mean when it was first introduced,
vine was called GIF-like and often confused with zhaifs.
GIF is at a particular technological,
cultural, and linguistic crossroads, indicating,
as pronunciation often does, something about the background
of the person speaking.
With "to-mah-to," "wood-er," or "corn-ah sto-ah,"
we understand what's being indicated.
Geography.
Maybe with the internet lacking geography in the same sense,
different jif pronunciations are not
tied to substantial recognized identities or dialects,
and therefore excused.
But are taken to indicate what authority a person respects.
What they do or do not know or understand.
So the stakes are higher.
And the argument ongoing, perhaps
needlessly if you ask me.
As long as whatever your pronunciation,
the people you're communicating with
know what you're talking about.
What do you all think?
Why has gif, jif, zhaif, turned into the pronunciation
quagmire and ongoing argument that it has?
Let us know in the comments.
And I'll respond to some of them in next week's comment response
video.
There is no comment response video this week.
If you missed last week's episode,
it was a furthermore video about developments in copyright
as it relates to Happy Birthday, and whether or not
you can hack your tractor, and open up the computer code that
runs your car.
If you want to watch that one, you can click here.
We'll be off next week because we'll be in Anaheim for VidCon.
So the next "Idea Channel" video you see
will not be next Wednesday but the Wednesday after that.
We'll put a link to both my VidCon schedule
and the schedule for all of the other PBS Digital Studios
hosts in the description.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit links
in the doobly-doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from John Guerra,
who responded when I asked if a jeweler had
made any or all of the rings from "Dark Souls?"
And if so, take my money, that he was
doing just that, which is rad.
And last but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these "guy-ant gu-raphs."