Comic Strips

But, there are patterns to the language and using a soft "g" sound doesn't follow those patterns, so it's objectively a less correct pronunciation.

Who makes these mystical "rules" that English surely follows? And who says the patterns you see are objectively more correct, there are a ton of other words with "g"/"gi" that pronounce it with a /dʒ/, you have to do some real mental gymnastics to justify one of them being more correct. There is a point where you have to paint a massively arbitrary line to which patterns are more "correct", it is a completely subjective matter.

Who cares about that guy?

He's the only one that can be considered an authority on how the word is pronounced LMAO.

He made a mistake, he should have looked up how words are pronounced before trying to get people to mispronounce "gif".

Pronunciation isn't based on spelling, it's the other way around. Writing is a tool made to accomodate language, and said writing isn't a pronunciation guide. You're lobotomized if you think otherwise, especially in English. But regardless, see below.

If he'd said it was supposed to be pronounced "dug" people would have just ignored him, but his attempt wasn't that absurd, it was just slightly wrong, so not everyone ignored him the way they should have.

But he didn't pronounce it like "dug". He pronounced it consistently with another common 3-letter word "gin". Is "gin" wrong now? You can cope with being wrong all you want, but it doesn't make you less wrong.

It really sounds like you didn't have friends. The rest of us did.

Yeah no that writing reads like a fake Reddit story, I refuse to believe even the dumbest teenagers would act like that.

Of course it does. How you pronounce things depends on the language you use. How people pronounce the letters "gif" is based on their language. In English, it's a hard g.

The English writing system isn't the English language, and the English writing system isn't consistent enough to make estimations for a pronunciation like that. The only two words in the language that contain "gif" are "gift" and "fungiform", plus derivatives of course, the latter of which is generally, by standard, pronounced with a /dʒ/ sound. If you think that's enough basis to go off of to make rules for every other word containing "gif", and then insist that your pronunciation is "correct", that's a you problem.

The same goes for any language – German has mostly-consistent generalized spelling conventions for the language that approximate pronunciation, but a LOT of common words break this convention, including "guken", "orange", the ending "-ig", "toilette", "vase", etc. which are pronounced differently than their spelling would lead you to believe. In fact it is most common for Fremdwörter & Lehnwörter to not be spelled typically. Is every German speaker pronouncing those words wrong now? What about Italian languages, which often do the same thing but significantly more? You can look at less and less standardized languages that contain more and more irregularities, until you get to a language like English and see that the "irregularities" in the writing system completely outweigh any actual "regularities" you see and it becomes completely pointless to try to enforce a pronunciation based on a certain spelling. It's why people learning a language like English or Tibetan or even Danish will have often cite the spelling as an extreme pain point (I can corroborate the first based on my experience teaching ESL), it is an inconsistent orthography where the spelling is almost entirely dependent on the etymology or something else, rather than any current pronunciation.

It's also convenient how you left out the entire part about the dictionaries. Almost as if that was a silver bullet for your flawed argument and you can't acknowledge it because it would make you look too crazy. Because the people who are the most looked up on for "correct" language by most English speakers say you're wrong. Hmmm.

When you consider that a large number of words in English which are spelled the same have different pronunciations or are pronounced wildly phonemically differently by different speakers or in different dialects, like "minute", "combat", "perfect", "read", "bass", "close", "agape", "object", "sewer", "wind", "wound"... "apricot", "leisure", "often", "crayon", "either", "been", "caramel", "garage", "yogurt"... your argument about pronunciation based on "spelling rules" falls apart pretty quickly.

Present your argument on how English works to any linguists or even anyone who has basic knowledge of linguistics and you'll be laughed out of the room.