A new PNG spec

Because the creator of gifs telling the world how he pronounced it made such a huge difference :)

Not sure I'll bother to reprogram myself from “png”, “pung”, or “pee-enn-gee”.

When someone makes a baby, you call that person by their real name with the correct pronunciation, don’t you?

So why can’t you do that with GIF or PNG? People that create things get to name them.

Because PNGs won't answer back when I call them by some "correct" name.

Depends...

You'll commonly call someone by their pronounced name out of respect, forced or given.

In a situation where someone does something really stupid or annoying and the forced respect isn't there, most people don't.

> People that create things get to name them.

And if they pick something dumb enough other people get to ignore them.

I've said "jif" for almost 40 years, and I'm not stopping anytime soon.

Hard-g is wrong, and those who use it are showing they have zero respect for others when they don't have to.

It's the tech equivalent to the shopping cart problem. What do you do when there is no incentive one way or the other? Do you do the right thing, or do you disrespect others?

Linguistic prescriptivism is wrong, and people who promote it are showing they have zero respect for others when they don't have to.

Is this a bit?

I agree that language is fluid. However, when it comes to names, I think people should have enough respect to pronounce things how the creator (or owner, depending on the situation) of the name says it should be pronounced. Too often people will mispronounce someone's name as a sign of intentional disrespect (see Kamala Harris for a fairly recent prominent example) and I cannot get behind that. You see a similar disrespect in the hard-soft discourse around the pronunciation of GIF. A lot of people use the hard g and mock the creator for thinking that soft g should ever have been right.

Naming is probably one of the few language areas that I think should be prescriptive, even while language at large is descriptive.

Absolutely not. See my response to your sibling comment. Choosy nerds choose "GIF".

A parent may name their baby Elizabeth. Then even the parent might call them Liz or Beth or Betsy or Bit or Bee.

I don’t think technical standards merit the same level of “deference to the creator” as personal names. People are wrong about standards they created all the time (ask me what I think about John Gruber’s “stewardship” of Markdown) and should be corrected, a standard is meant for all. Obviously the pronunciation of an acronym isn’t anywhere near as important as technical details, but I think the principle holds.

If the creator insists on a weird pronunciation, because of an inside joke most won't ever get, then I feel no responsibility in humoring them.

The G in gif is for graphics. Not 'giraffics'. And most people in the world have no idea what Jif even is, much less a particular catchphrase from an old ad campaign that barely even connects.

As much as I hate jif, thinking about it, "GPU" works the same - we say gee-pee-you and not gh-pee-you. Garbage Collection is also gee-cee. So it's only logical that jif is the correct one - even if it's not the widely accepted one.

Wrt/ communication, aside from personal preference, one can either respect the creator, or the audience. If I stand in front of 10 colleagues, 10 out of them would not understand jif, or would only get it because this issue has some history now. gif on the other hand has no friction.

Ghengis Khan for example sounds very different from its original Mongolian pronunciation. And there is a myriad others as well.

pronounce the jraphics interchange format any way you want, everyone knows what you're talking about anyway -- try not to get so worked up. It's not the shopping cart problem, because no-one is measurably harmed by not choosing the same pronunciation as you.

And the P in JPEG is for photographic, so you better be saying jay-feg if you want to rely on that logic.

i'll start using hard-g gif when you start saying "jfeg" ;)

The whole debate seems to be a modern phenomenon to me - from my anecdotal experience back in the day, it was never questioned by computer enthusiasts that it was pronounced "jif".

Linguistic prescriptivism has nothing to do with it.

English has both pronunciations for "gi" based on origin. Giraffe, giant, ginger, etc from Latin; gift, give, (and presumably others) from Germanic roots.

Using the preferred one is just a matter of politeness.

Also, it's quite ironic to prescribe "linguistic prescriptivism" as wrong.

First, it's not a baby, that's a ridiculous comparison.

But also, no, not universally even for babies, especially when the name is something ridiculous like X Æ A-Xii where even parents disagree on pronunciation, or when the person himself uses a "non-specced" variant

People are wrong about the children they create all the time too, and should be corrected.

If everyone conformed, then we would have no fun lively debates on things like this. That would be a boring world.

A child is presumably a sentient being, and at some point in their life should gain control of their name. In fact, they do, to some large degree. There are means to change one's legal name, or one can diverge from their legal name and professionally/publicly use a completely different name.

A file format is not a sentient being. The creator's intent matters much more. If GIF had sentience and could voice a desire one way or the other, the whole discussion would be moot as it would clearly be disrespectful to intentionally mispronounce the name.

I (as a non-native English speaker) have pronounced it with a hard g since first i saw it (mid ’90s) and many years before I learned how the creator preferred it to be pronounced.

I continue to pronounce it how I prefer it, not as a slight, but most people here would be surprised by the soft g.

If I ever meet him I’ll attempt to pronounce it soft-g.

On the other hand, even though my name exists and is reasonably common in English, I’m fairly certain neither you or the GIF creator would address me the way I pronounce my name. I would understand anyway, and wouldn’t care one bit.

I have the same experience - but with gif. Mind you, me and my circle are not native English speakers.

The debate itself is old. "Since the 90s" Wikipedia says, and keep in mind the format was is from 1987 - so I would say the debate is on from the get-go. Appropriate, too, if you think back, arguing about this kind of stuff was pretty common. Emacs vs vim, browser wars, different kinds of computers, tribalism everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_GIF

Unfortunately for your crusade, the soft-G pronunciation has essentially been typo-squatted since before typo-squatting was a thing.

https://file.org/extension/jif

https://fileinfo.com/extension/jiff

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4rirr8/til_t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#JPEG_files

There is a huge difference between inanimate objects/classes and babies. Don't personify inanimate objects, they hate that!

On inanimate objects: Aluminium was first ratified by the IUPAC as aluminium⁰, with the agreement of its discoverer Sir Humphrey Davy¹, yet one huge nation calls it something else…

On people: nicknames are a thing, are you saying those are universally wrong? But yes, when a person tells me that they'd prefer their name pronounced a different way, or that they'd prefer a different name entirely, or that they don't like the nickname other use for them, you can bet your arse that I'll make the effort to use their preferred name+pronunciation in future.

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[0] Though it should be noted that aluminum was, a few years after, officially accepted as an alternate form.

[1] He initially called it aluminum in the first paper.

I think “since the 90s” here is “since the late 90s”. When I first was aware of gif files (in the early 90s IIRC) I only saw the name and meaning in print so went with the hard G to match the g's pronunciation in graphics, I don't think I was aware of the original intention to pronounce it jif until somewhere in the early 2000s, at which point the use of the hard g was almost ubiquitous and the soft g idea was presented as an interesting/amusing aside.

You are aware that kids generally don't get to pick the nicknames they end up being called and their parents definitely don't either.

Insisting on one out of multiple possible pronunciations when most people naturally pick a different one is the definition of linguistic prescriptivism. Politeness doesn't have anything to do with it, people are not required to let individuals dictate how our collective language works.

One of Wiki's sources date it back as far as 1994, and that's a news article, so the thing must have been going on for a while.

Thinking about it, I think I understand why hard G makes sense for people. With GPU, we pronounce the the individual letters, as it's clearly an abbreviation - as no sane English word starts with "gp". With GIF though, even though it's an abbreviation, it looks a lot like a normal word, "gift", and English also has "give", another one with a hard G, so it feels familiar to say. Moreover, the US, where GIF comes from, has Jif already established as a peanut butter brand, so it makes sense to not pronounce a newly invented, differently written word the same as an already established thing. Well, at least to some it makes sense!

Let people name their offspring, both biological and technical.