There comes, in life, certain times when good, God-fearing Americans encounter such bafflingly stupid arguments that they are compelled by their most inner sense of justice to respond. I recently read How to Really Pronounce GIF, an argument by Aaron Bazinet, and this is one of those times.
For a brief history, the graphics interchange format, or GIF, was developed in 1987 by Steve Wilhite and was pronounced as the peanut butter brand (with a soft G, or voiced post-alveolar affricate) as a deliberate pun. When it came out a common slogan was "choosy devlopers choose GIF," a play on the slogan for the peanut butter. People who originally used the format used this pronunciation. Over time, because of the fact that most people read the letters in the extension '.gif' before ever hearing the word pronounced, the pronunciation with a hard G (a voiced velar stop) became more and more common.
Now you might think that upon hearing such an explanation a reasonable person would conceed that if there were a correct pronunciation, it would be with a soft G, but that language changes over time, and the prevalence of the hard G means that it has become an accepted pronunciation as well. You might think that because it is correct. But some people are not reasonable, and insist not that the soft G is the sole way to say GIF, which is at least understandable, but that the hard G is! Think about what would happen if a child were to stumble upon content like this. They'd be scarred. Damaged for life. Yet we live in a society that just allows such filth.
Let's go through each argument presented in 'How to Really Pronounce GIF' and see just how it's causing the downfall of our society.
"It's the most logical"
It’s the most natural, logical way to pronounce it. That’s why when everyone comes across the word for the first time, they use a hard G.
The reason everyone pronounces it with a hard G the first time they read it is because of the way it's written. But orthography is not language; the way a language is written does not, inherently, have anything to do with the way it is spoken. This is the first thing you learn in any intro to linguistics class. You would think fluency in English would disabuse anyone of this notion, but apparently not.
Digging his grave even deeper, Bazinet then goes on to detail how exactly this is supposedly the "most logical" way to pronounce GIF.
Every word that starts with G, then a vowel, then an F, is pronounced with a hard G. For example: Gaffe. Gift. Guff. Guffaw.
This is true, but irrelevant, because there are words that start with a soft G sound and yet are followed by a vowel and then an F: the very common English name of Jeff (often spelled 'Geoff', with a G!), and the namesake of the GIF, Jif. No native speaker of English finds these words weird or foreign. It is perfectly natural in English for there to be a soft G and F around a vowel, it just isn't as common as the same with a hard G.
This argument is purely one about spelling, which is irrelevant to whether a word can be pronounced a certain way, especially in a language like English.
Most one-syllable words that start with G have a hard G.
Again, an argument purely about spelling, but an even worse one. Most words that have an L pronounce it as such, and yet we have the word 'Colonel'. What is the "correct" way to pronounce 'gh' given that it's different in the words 'rough', 'light', and 'ghost'? English is replete with such oddities because spelling is more of a reflection of etymology than actual pronunciation. It is part of the etymology of 'GIF' that it is an acronym of 'graphics interchange format', but its pronunciation is something independent of that.
The word “gift” is the closest word to GIF, and it has a hard G.
Yet another spelling argument. 'Lead' (as in the metal) is the most similar word to 'lead' (as in the verb meaning to show the way), 'read' (present tense) is the most similar word to 'read' (past tense), yet the wonders of English allow them to be pronounced differently. The very existence of homographs such as these should be more than enough to show why similar spelling does not imply similar pronunciation.
The word “graphics” does have a hard G, but that doesn’t necessarily influence the pronunciation.
To his credit, Bazinet doesn't make, and clearly repudiates, one of the most common and by far the worst argument for pronouncing 'GIF' with a hard G. Unfortunely, he concludes with an equally stupid argument of his own, which he even puts in bold, as if he thinks it's extra good or something.
If the Jif peanut butter company never existed, he [Wilhite] would have never pronounced GIF with a soft G.
If the Jif peanut butter company never existed, he would have never named it GIF in the first place! "Graphics Interchange Format" is the most generic possible name for an image format; its name was chosen precisely because it can be pronounced as 'Jif'.
Why might people pronounce it with a soft G?
The reason people pronounce 'GIF' with a soft G is because that was how the word was actually pronounced. All the people who said 'GIF' used a soft G until people read the word without hearing it pronounced. For a long time I thought the word 'requite' was pronounced 'rehkwit' instead of the correct pronunciation of 'ruhkwight'. Growing up I read all sorts of words before hearing them pronounced, and often got the pronunciation wrong. This is common in English, and was exacerbated for 'GIF' because it's a name of a file extension, something people are far more likely to read than hear spoken.
Yet instead of people hearing the correct pronunciation and accepting it, they kept on insisting on using their assumed pronunciation.
Imagine a child reading the word 'knight' in one of his books, and pronouncing it phonetically, and imagine that that child went to his mother and said this word with his pronunciation, upon which his mother corrects him. Surely you would agree that a properly behaved child would accept his mother's correction, along with the fact that English is not phonetically consistent.
But not so with people who pronounced 'GIF' with a hard G, who were not sufficiently mannered, as most children are.
But that's all in the past. Enough time passes and language changes, and now there are two correct pronunciations. All would be at peace, except that people who pronounce the word with a hard G, betraying the insolence common to misbehaved children, began to insist that their pronunciation, derived from a mistake, is in fact the only correct pronunciation.
And so here we are.
So how should you pronounce it?
However you'd like, of course.
I pronounce it with a soft G, however, and despite recognizing both pronunciations as correct, I would like to conclude with an argument for this pronunciation.
Why the soft G is the better way
There are no linguistic arguments to support either pronunciation, but here are two things to consider regardless:
It's the way the creator intended
Now, as noted by Bazinet, the cheif editor of the Oxford English Dictionary says that
A coiner effectively loses control of a word once it’s out there.
Which is completely correct, but there's something fundamentally different in this case. Wilhite didn't just coin a new word, he made an invention and then gave it a name. 'GIF' is not a common noun, but a proper noun, and as such it's much more reasonable to treat it like a parent giving their child an odd name than someone just creating a new word wholesale.
Puns are cool
I feel this point speaks for itself.
Ultimately, pronounce it the way you like, but don't make linguistically uninformed arguments about how there can only be one, especially when the pronunciation for which you're arguing is derived from a mistake.