I’m weighing in on the gif pronunciation wars at Mental Floss with the help of corpus linguistics:
Sure, the creator of the gif, Steve Wilhite, prefers a soft g, and sure, gif originated as an acronym for graphics interchange format, but inventors aren’t always good at naming (the zipper was originally called the “clasp locker”), and acronyms aren’t always pronounced like their roots (the “a” in NATO isn’t the same as the “a” in Atlantic). In truth, language is far more democratic.
So Michael Dow, a linguistics professor at Université de Montréal, decided to investigate a different way, and I talked with him about his findings. The idea is, people decide how to pronounce a new word based on its resemblance to words they’re already familiar with. So we can all agree on how to pronounce snapchat because it’s made up of familiar words snap and chat, and we don’t have any problems with blog because it rhymes with frog, log, slog, and so on, but we have no idea how to pronounce doge because there aren’t any other common English words that end in -oge.
The problem with gif isn’t the back half—we already know how to pronounce if. The problem is the front half: Does the i make the g soft or not? It’s clearly not an absolute yes or no—there are English words in both categories: gift has a hard g before i, whereas gin has a soft g before i. What matters is the frequency. So Dow looked at a large corpus of 40,000 unique words with their frequency and pronunciation taken from The English Lexicon Project. Of these words, how many were like gift (hard g) and how many were like gin (soft g)?
“It baffles me that grown men would be obsessed with a cartoon intended for children.”
“I know, man, I totally agree, the Pokemon fanbase weirds me the fuck out”
MMMMMMmMMm smol bby 2 good 4 this world
Too bad she is forever bound in a constant cycle of death and rebirth and can never leave this world.
Also, she sins too much. She is a sinamon roll
Onision vs Whole Foods
Hahhaha decided to get all these in one post. This is hilarious. Greg’s really trying hard this week to have something to be mad about..
Reusable bags are inconvenient? Really Greg? Really? I thought you were an environmentalist now with that fancy car you’ve been bragging about, plus you’ve been tweeting all week about how meat eaters are destroying the earth.. but you can’t use a fucking reusable bag?? This is gold.
He’s just the victim of whole foods’ recyclable bags ))’’: Poor greggy. Not the veganaise! NOOOO!!! THOSE MONSTERS!
Did Lainey not change his diaper? Did a popular and more talented YouTuber make a video that’s receiving more attention than his recycled garbage “Bing search” videos? What a fucking brat.
then who’s gonna be the next idiot to try and invade russia during winter
I want the world to understand computers don’t just do things, they only do what the user tells them to do.
“Digital art is cheating! The computer does it!” No, the user painted it.
“Digital music isn’t real! The computer makes it!” No, the user composed it.
“I don’t know what happened. The computer just started acting weird on its own.” NO, YOU’VE BEEN CLICKING ADS AGAIN, MOM.
Drag is to Trans as Brony is to Pedophile
Just like a guy wearing a dress doesn’t mean he’s trans, a grown ass adult liking a children’s show does not make them a pedophile. But it’s the common misconception anyways and people will argue it to their graves.
the fact that people need to be TOLD this shit is honestly sad and shows just how little people really know about or truly support the trans community.
