Jnome, like gif.
If gif is pronounced gif, the gnome should be pronounced gnome
Gi gives the g a j sound. Like gist, gibberish, giraffe, giant do at least that one is easy to pick up on.
Gi gives
You will also note that the pronunciation of gif is debated despite me saying it’s easy to pick up on.
Gift
I love how you state that as a fact as if worlds like give, gift, gill, gibbon, giddy, etc don’t exist.
please tell me you call it JIT-HUB.
I do now.
Hi Jinny
Like the peanut butter?
It would seem gnome is the correct pronunciation. GNU naming conventions are a pipe dream.
this is like the dude who invented GIF thinking everyone was going to call it “jiff”. it ain’t happening, broski.
I miss Idea Channel a lot.
The G stands for Jraphics
Yeah, just like the U stands for oonderwater in SCUBA, or the P stands for potographics in JPG!
That or Giraffe Interchange Format
This should be part of ISO
So, out of curiosity, how would you pronounce CHiPs?
No, it stands for Jira.
jay-pheg
It’s pronounced “emm-preg.”
Am I… Mpegante? Mpegananat?
mpeg is now prounounced:
plap plap plap preganante
Thank you, I needed this comment.
Rough day.
MPEG?
It’s pronounced gay-peg /jk
It’s a hard sound, guh-pegg.
Personally, I usually default to png/poonj.
The format was originally designed to interchange animated palettised depictions of giraffes, so Giraffic Interchange Format made sense. They just changed the acronym when they realised that by storing different colours in the palette, you could depict things other than giraffes.
Giraffic Interchange Format made sense
In no world does that collection of words ring true, regardless of context.
you could depict things other than giraffes
But why would you?
GPUs were originally created to render giraffes faster, hence the name. The fact that they’re also useful for gaming are as coincidental as their usefulness for crypto mining and LLMs.
A gif is just the output format after running loads of OpenGiraffeLib code through a GPU.
animated palettised depictions of giraffes
So… where are these originals?
say the letters individually. Then do it again faster. Then again faster still. Once it becomes a single syllable instead of three, then you will have arrived at the correct pronunciation.
I dare you to try this with every other acronym
Hahaha was my instant plan after reading the comment
ADHS people 🙌🏻
why?
Because it will show you the error with your argument: Your approach to pronouncing acronyms is likely not consistent with the method you’re describing here.
I’m not applying my argument to other acronyms though, I’m applying it to the .gif file extension.
Bruh
Welcome to… Jraphic Park!
It’s obviously pronounced “jif” just like giraffe.
Hey, not everyone was born to be a king.
What about HiFi though? The Fi comes from fidelity, yet it’s pronounced like the fi in finite.
English is weirdYou can start pronouncing it correctly. There are so many English accents, why not have one that pronounces words how they should be pronounced?
It is called jiff tho?
not any more than gnome is called guh-nome.
Jif is a peanut butter brand
Mmm, creamy
Maximum cleaning
Minimum scrubbing
I’ll never have to buy toilet paper again!
Edit: Also, I like the taste of citrus so that’s nice too!
That’s why you had to spell it wrong in order to communicate that.
yes, the J comes from Jraphics
Giraffes in shambles
To be fair once you make a word from an acronym, it doesn’t really matter what the pronunciation of the individual words was.
alright start saying jfeg
jpej
Well, it’s not the P that’s read like an F, it’s PH that’s read like an F. If it was jpheg it would be read jfeg.
Idk why you’re being downvoted, jfeg makes 0 sense
I didn’t downvote either of you, but here is why I disagree. The P is inseparable from the H in this situation. I would pronounce the P as half of a PH if I could, but “puh” is nothing like the first half of the sound “phuh”.
I’m just realizing that they must be gettinf the ph from the P in JPEG standing for Photographic. I’m guessing the argument is that gif is pronounced like gift (germanic root) vs giraffe (latin/italian) because graphics has a hard g. But if gif was a word there’s obviously some people who would pronounce it that was, if jpeg was a word, we probably wouldn’t say Jay-pehg but nobody would pronounce the p like a ph so there’s no need to resort to the component words of the acronym.
I have a very negative aura about myself.
I have always pronounced git as get (mostly because of accent) bit I watched a video the other day, and they pronounced it as Jit and my whole world fell apart. Was I pronouncing it wrong? Are they dumb? Was this secretly a gif jiff issue?
I have to deal with rej-ex (regex) and red-diss (Redis) at work a lot.
How’s Redis pronounced?
I say ree-diss because it’s redis as in remote dictionary server.
The privilege in living in a normally German talking country is that we don’t have the gif and regex problem
Except of course we did then and we do now. Too bad none of you ever looked at how G can be pronounced.
I understand that the letter G can make that sound. I am still saying, however, that the overwhelming vast majority of people pronounce it “gif” as in gift, and not “jiff” as in we’re not calling it that. stomp your feet as you will, it’s not gonna change anything.
No the overwhelming majority of kids think its pronounced that way. The majority of us who were around when it was written know how its pronounced. How do we know? We know because the guy who wrote it told us.
I first heard it in pronounced “jif” from a guy in my college dorm in the mid 90s. I’ve just pronounced it that way every since. Is it there a generation gap in how it’s pronounced? I do catch some flak from my kids about how I pronounce it.
Sometime around 2010 was the first time I encountered someone who was foaming at the mouth certain about how I was saying it wrong. Considering by that time I had know about the file format for twenty years I dismissed their error. Its really funny watching all these people making fools out of themselves in defense of getting it wrong. The very first article I read about the format specifically showed the pronunciation. All in all I think its stupid how they will not or can not accept they got it wrong. Instead they call me a boomer or make some lame argument that the author and the company that came up with it. The company that owned it don’t get to decide what to call it. I dive in every time this comes up as its entertaining watching all these ‘fetuses’ get it wrong.
I encountered someone who was foaming at the mouth certain about how I was saying it wrong
And here you are. The circle is complete.
Ah yes, jraphics, it makes total sense now thank you sensei you are a bastion of knowledge teaching us young bucks
Quick edit: you really got everyone good with the fetus line, there sure are some ruffled feathers lawl way to go champ
I was young in the late 80’s and it was all new. I had a IBM AT, a bell 300 baud modem and a bluebox. The internet wasn’t really much at that point. We used tymnet nodes to access compuserve and some BBS. It was the best shit ever. Gif was a incredible improvement over bmp and tiff. I had two 20meg hard drives and converting to gif saved me a huge amount of space :).
The only reason anyone knows of the gif format is due to unisys backing off their royalty push in 94. A few years before there was a compression standard. The files were .arc. They made a big play at getting the BBS systems in the country to pay for using it and in less than a month they all switched to zip. You have of course heard of zip but arc died a quick death for being pushy. It was just a few years before unisys went after mosaic. It didn’t get very far because it triggered a similar action and it was clear gif wasn’t going to get much. They went after a few corporations but largely left the fledgling browsers alone.
No one questioned the name when they presented it. No one argued it because it wasn’t a problem. This whole pronunciation thing is really quite silly. It goes right along side other silly things such as which way the toilet paper goes on a roller. When kids these days say it wrong I leave it uncommented but invariably when I pronounce it correctly in a crowd of them one will attempt to correct me and trigger a “boomersplain” of exactly why they are incorrect. I give them the history of it until their eyes glaze over. Which is also fun.
Only I’m not a boomer. I’m a member of the meh generation.
I was around before gifs even existed. No one I knew ever pronounced it jif. It was always like gift. In fact, I never even heard any question of how it was pronounced well into the use of gifs.
I was around before they existed as well. I remember reading a article about the new format and dialing into CompuServe in 1988 and downloading the first compiler and decoders for it. I remember how the article specifically showed the pronunciation. I know I say it correctly as the author and unisys intended. I remember when unisys was butthurt in 94 and tried to charge the whole world wide web for it and how that failed. I remember it all so it doesn’t matter if you or anyone else got it wrong.
I didn’t.
We know because the guy who wrote it told us.
The guy who first wrote “eiland” spelled it as such. Then some idiot put an ‘s’ on it as a stylistic choice to latinize a word that has no Latin root. Now if you spell it any way other than “island” you are wrong because that is the way to word is used and understood.
Or, to put it another way, if you want to insist language is set in stone let me translate for you:
Se mann þe ǣrest wrāt “eiland,” swā hine stæfode. Þā sum dysig mann an ‘s’ onlēde swā stīlcræft, tō Lǣden sprǣce þæt word þe næfþ nān Lǣden rōt. Nū gif þū hine stæfian on ǣnige wīsan būtan “island,” þū bist wōh, forþām þæt is sēo wīs þe þæt word is gebrocen and understonden.
Se mann þe ǣrest wrāt “eiland,” swā hine stæfode. Þā sum dysig mann an ‘s’ onlēde swā stīlcræft, tō Lǣden sprǣce þæt word þe næfþ nān Lǣden rōt. Nū gif þū hine stæfian on ǣnige wīsan būtan “island,” þū bist wōh, forþām þæt is sēo wīs þe þæt word is gebrocen and understonden.
See, if that person that insists on using thorns in all their comments really committed like this, I think they’d get less flak, and more buy-in.
The other guy told me it’s called X, but I still pronounce it Twitter.
Thank you for that pointless attempt at comparison. They never changed the name of gif nor the pronunciation of it.
Mf, if you pronounce BMW as bee em double-you…
Yup, I’m right about you.
Yeah ok boomer 😂
Okay Fetus but
Nope, try again.
What? The creator of GIF has made it very clear it is not pronounced Jiff.
And this is why Sonic and Shadow never sit down together for thanksgiving
I feel like if I’m pronouncing any Linux package for the first time, there’s some tongue-in-cheek “um, actually” trap hidden just around the corner for some self-righteous geek to correct you with a big smirk on their face because they get to feel smarter, which I used to be guilty of, but try to cut back on as much as I can these days.
It’s a fun joke at first, but I kind of got tired of it after a while, and just decided that politely educating in context and ignoring it otherwise feels way nicer.
I’ve never met anyone who took this seriously in real life. Like they know what you mean and will joke about the pronunciation. But I read a lot more about these holy wars online.
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Maybe English should just get rid of the stupid “the first consonant is silent when two consonants form the beginning of a word” rule tbf.
It’s a skill issue to mispronounce loan words (like gnome, pterodactyl or psychology).
Snail, small, three, press, change. I could keep going.
I’ve never heard of that rule. There are a few combos that are basically always that way though: pt, gn, and kn come to mind.
And then there are the cases where two consonants combine to form another sound entirely: ph, ch, sh, th.
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That’s just every language once you get into it. English is a fairly standard north germanic language. There’s been a lot of mythology built around it over the years which often leads to misunderstandings, especially from monolinguals who simply have nothing to compare to.
Funny you mention Germanic languages, given how deterministic German itself is on pronunciation of letters.
The German language is ironically one of the weirder Germanic languages. When I say North Germanic languages I mostly mean what is now known as Scandinavian languages (and sometimes Dutch depending on who you ask).
Gotcha. I wish more languages were like German in their adherence to letter-phoneme pairing.
I think they’ve been on the ball with spelling reforms as the language has evolved. The last one as recently as in 1996. English has no central authority for spelling, making such reforms much harder to implement. Conservatives are of course, like always, a problem. Being against any and all spelling reform. The main argument seem to be that it makes it harder for people to read really old texts in their original form. Which for some reason makes spelling and speach drifting apart worth it. I known Swedish conservative pseudo-intellectuals often praise the English for it’s lack of reform.
I was already an adult when I learned that “salmon” is supposed to be pronounced as “sammon”.
Thanks for the painful laugh, Gugulethu
Wait wait wait… How are baked and naked supposed to be pronounced?
I think, e is silent in baked and not in naked. But that’s kind of like Sean Bean
I’ve been pronouncing naked as baked for a while now. Thankfully it doesn’t come up in conversation as often.
out of curiosity, do you speak another language than English?
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English is a mix and match of a bunch of other languages
If you don’t pronounce the p in pterodactyl or psychiatrist then lose my number
If I start pronouncing them, can I get your number?
You just want to see the pretty bunnies, won’t you?
Tortoise might be fine too
Who wouldn’t
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In Italian “gn” sounds like a brief “nyuh” or “ny” like in gnocchi.
So “nyome”.
Nyohmaye 🤌
Nyuma nyohma nyohmaye
also lasagna unless you’re British and you prefer yourself a la-zag-na
guh-new is not unix folks…
JIMP or GIMP?
Zhimp
sub
I have absolutely no idea how “Linux” is supposed to be pronounced. True story.
Here’s a helpful mnemonic: “Jet Li got eczema from radiation poisoning”
Li - as in Jet Li nu - as in nuculer radiation x - as in eczema
Li-nu-x
Using “nuclear” as an example of how to correctly pronounce a different word is a bold choice
Check my spelling again.
I pronounce it the usual way, but in the back of my mind (I keep forgetting to look into it), I’ve wondered if the “I” was originally intended to be pronounced like “Linus”.
In early versions of Linux when manually setting up your sound card, Redhat came with a test audio clip of Linus Torvolds saying “I province Linux as Linux”. Even though it is named after him he did not pronounce it like his name: Ly-nix.
linu as in Linus Torvalds.
X as in unix
from the horse’s (penguin’s?) mouth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IfHm6R5le0
…so, “Lie-Nux”?
goddamnit. You can lead an american to water, but you can’t make them drink. Yes, technically speaking, in english he would pronounce his name as “Lie-nus”. The correct pronunciation of the word that is his name is Li-nus. Some people choose to adapt their name to the audience they are talking to so that the audience has an easier time understanding or saying their name. But the actual way that name is pronounced correctly is different than the manners they are presenting.
Based on how he pronounces his name in his native tongue (and a neighboring country) the correct pronunciation , if you are looking for it, would be Li-nuks. If you want to pronounce it using the compromise he is kindly offering to people who can’t pronounce anything properly, then you should call it Lie-nuks, but then again, you might as well pronounce it however the fuck you want and keep being wrong; the point of asking how you should pronounce something is to improve yourself and the way you say words.
Source : I had my name butchered whenever people try to pronounce it. I go by shortened versions that avoid the “difficult” part.
I don’t whats worse, having your name constantly butchered, or having to deal with a copywrite dispute with the 3 other people in the room with the same name for ownership of it.
It’s pronounced like this
Its pronounced GIF
The Jraphics Interchange Format.
SCUBA - self-contained oonderwater breathing apparatus
Laser - light ay-mplification by ztimulated emission (good luck pronouncing the e) of radiation
ASAP - Ay-s Soon As Possible
oonderwater
It’s eunderwater
Praise Jod for your comment. I’d jive you a jift but i don’t know where you live
Just dont send me a giant giraffe. I’d take some gin though, or I could even use some ginger. Im sure you get the gist
I see your argument and discount it entirely.
No it’s not
And then I’m out there pronouncing it G-Nome…
I was hoping I wasn’t alone. I pronounced it genome for years before some neck beard took me to task for it. They also were mad at me for pronouncing CentOS like DOS (centahs rather than cent oh ess).
I also used to pronounce Gnome this way.
I’ll add I used to say “deb eye ann”, for Debian
And used to say “uh lie us”, for alias
I didn’t have a lot of people to talk about Linux with lol
To be fair, Debian is a portmanteau of Debra and Ian so most people don’t pronounce it the way Ian Murdock intended.
This only makes sense to me because my aunt worked on guh-noo.
Yohohoho!
I’m not a KDE, I’m not XFCE, I’m not LTQt, I’m not a Hyprland, I’m not a Cinnamon, I’m a Guh-Nome! And you have been Guh-Nomed!
borks your Linux
Today I’m learning this and now I learn GNU is supposed to be pronounced “guh-NEW”
Obviously… since their logo and spelling is the same as the animal… pronounced “noo”.
Fuck it, it’s jee en you
lol
