this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
1849 points (98.0% liked)

Comic Strips

12655 readers
1748 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] EssentialCoffee@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

GIF was pronounced with soft g since it came out, back in the 80s/90s when it was shared on AOL and CompuServe.

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.

[โ€“] ShortFuse@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.