this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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It's interesting debate to observe from my perspective as my native tongue has no different pronunciations for letters, they are always the same regardless of their placement in words. G is always pronounced the same, and so is P. (Spoiler: it's hard G and hard P).
This brought another thing in my mind about soft G. Let's take for example Gin, which is with soft G I believe (it's hard G here because there is only hard G). Then there is the acronym GT for Gin & Tonic. The question is, in English language countries, is the acronym pronounced jay-T instead of gee-T?
All English is based on etymology which is why it's such a hard language to learn. Looking at how a word is spelled always takes second place to where it comes from.
GIF was pronounced with soft g since it came out, back in the 80s/90s when it was shared on AOL and CompuServe. Year, decades, later it came back into social media with Reddit and Twitter, and people pronounced it based on what it looked like it would sound like, which is most similar to hard g like gift.
That doesn't mean GIF never had a soft g. It just shows how old you are or when you discovered it when you use the hard g.
FWIW, in the 80s & 90s, everyone I knew pronounced it with a hard G, including folks at computer shows, which my family used to go to frequently.
To me, the soft g 'jif' pronunciation is the new Internet fad, not the other way around.
https://www.olsenhome.com/gif/compuserve-big.jpg
Since it was announced in 1987, if they mentioned the pronunciation it was soft G. The inventor and CompuServe would tell you it was soft G. CompuServe's applications would tell you if soft G in their docs.
It's even in the documentation of PNG which came out 7 years later that says soft G is correct in GIF, and they wanted people to pronounce PNG as "ping", not "pinj". (Yes, really)
See https://www.olsenhome.com/gif/ for more examples.
Where it comes from matters less than historic pronunciations.
"Lawn-jer-ay" is how most of the English word pronounces "lingerie" even though that's nothing like how it's pronounced in French, nor is it anything like what you'd pronounce if you sounded out those letters assuming it was an English word.
"Lieutenant" is pronounced completely differently in the UK vs the US. It's etymology is also French, but neither English pronunciation is at all close to the French. Somehow the British get an "f" sound in there, which can't be explained by spelling or etymology, and somehow the American pronunciation turns "ieu" into an "oo" sound.
As for "gif", the "aol and compuserve" thing shows the problem: text based forums. The first time people encountered the word was by reading it. As an unfamiliar word, they mostly went with the common English rule of finding similar words. In this case, the only other words with "gif" are "gift" and words based on "gift". Since that has a hard G, from the very start people have been using the hard "G" sound.
ive only heard G&T pronounced jee & tee
It's basically the same with English always using a hard G for native English words. The complication comes from the fact that English preserves the pronunciation and spelling of loan words and loan words make up something like half of all words in English. The vast majority of words in English that use a soft G are French or Latin loan words, with a few Greek words that had their pronunciation latinized.
English doesn't preserve the pronunciation. It approximates the pronunciation while keeping the spelling, and that pronunciation drifts over time and changes in different places. See: Lieutenant, a word that has two wildly different pronunciations in English, neither of which sound anything like the original French word.