720
TIL When you hover over a piece of the phonetic notation on (English) Wikipedia, it shows you an example for its pronunciation
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Well then why the can't GIF be GIF? Especially if the stated rule is the exception?
and germ, gene, gel, gist, gem, gym... Anyway, see your above quote.
Some rules are stupid and unintuitive. Sure it's not "read as written". But ask someone who is not familiar with and has never seen the word knave how to spell it. Adding a K would not be intuitive. Regardless, see your above quote.
Yes, old words have had plenty of time for the original pronunciations and spellings to be forgotten and warped between cultures and generations. We cant ask the creators of most words how they were pronounced and those creators (if indeed a given word can be tracked to one creator, as can GIF), who are long dead, no longer give a shit and it's unlikely that those changes were made in their lifetime. Do we know how they were pronounced in the past thanks to recorded history? Sure. Language changes over long periods of time. Like the climate, lots of small changing weather patterns over very long time periods creates a climate. People don't just wake up one day and collectively say "fuck this word in particular" only to have everyone who speaks that language just change their ways. It happens over very long periods of time. GIF has hardly had any time for the original pronunciation lost to the ages. In fact, the guy who made it up only died 3 years ago, and he specifically told you how to say it. You then learned of this, and decided you knew better because it's spelled funny for how it's pronounced and then forgot:
My chief complaint here is that when someone tells you how a word they have invented is pronounced, and you pronounce it differently on purpose, even if somehow your pronunciation was not objectively wrong, it's still incredibly disrespectful to the person who created it.
And so, GIF is pronounced "jif", even if that makes it an "exception".