I’m not a gnoblin.
I’m not a gnelf.
I’m a gnome. And you’ve been…
Gnooooommmmmmed!!!
Back when video games had more imagination than pixels, there was a mech simulator game called G-Nome. Which was the name of the enemy, pronounced “Genome.”
Our DNA guh nome.
I was wondering just now if that was what the devs were going for, originally? I had never thought about it.
I guess I missed the joke, because I always assumed there was no ambiguity on the pronunciation… Are there people saying “G nome”, really ? I bet they calls GIF files Jiff, too!
🤣 now I have “Jnomee” in my head and will never be able to un-hear that
Yes there are those who insist that the GNOME desktop environment is pronounced “guh-nome” because of GNU.
See, all open source software projects must have complete diaper fire names. Bonus points if you put more thought into the name than the software, like HURD.
Or WINE 🥰
WINE is true, it Is Not Emulation.
The one I hate is LAME, which definitly IS an MP3 Encoder.
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
this is like the dude who invented GIF thinking everyone was going to call it “jiff”. it ain’t happening, broski.
The G stands for Jraphics
jay-pheg
It’s pronounced “emm-preg.”
Am I… Mpegante? Mpegananat?
Thank you, I needed this comment.
Rough day.
mpeg is now prounounced:
plap plap plap preganante
It’s a hard sound, guh-pegg.
Personally, I usually default to png/poonj.
It’s pronounced gay-peg /jk
jay pee gee
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?
Yeah, just like the U stands for oonderwater in SCUBA, or the P stands for potographics in JPG!
No, it stands for Jira.
That or Giraffe Interchange Format
This should be part of ISO
So, out of curiosity, how would you pronounce CHiPs?
Welcome to… Jraphic Park!
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
And this is why Sonic and Shadow never sit down together for thanksgiving
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.
The privilege in living in a normally German talking country is that we don’t have the gif and regex problem
How’s Redis pronounced?
I say ree-diss because it’s redis as in remote dictionary server.
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?
I miss Idea Channel a lot.
Yeah… I always made sure I had some Idea Channel, VSauce, and Veritasium on tap whenever possible. The latter is the only one that really still does it’s thing… and even that’s getting a little sus these days with Derek promoting general “ai” usage. :/
It’s obviously pronounced “jif” just like giraffe.
It is called jiff tho?
yes, the J comes from Jraphics
Giraffes in shambles
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.
To be fair once you make a word from an acronym, it doesn’t really matter what the pronunciation of the individual words was.
That’s why you had to spell it wrong in order to communicate that.
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!
not any more than gnome is called guh-nome.
What? The creator of GIF has made it very clear it is not pronounced Jiff.
Hey, not everyone was born to be a king.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah ok boomer 😂
Okay Fetus but
Nope, try again.
Phonetically it’s pronounced “K-D-E-is-superior”
But hey, language is protean. It evolves and flows like a river, daddy-o.
KDE MFs be like, “it’s very intuitive.” Meanwhile it looks like this:
Ahh! Home!
Just need to paint all panels and table surfaces black and highlight the knobs and dials.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.
Gnome is very aesthetic, but I swear it’s useless. You open Gnome Something Utility and it opens a flat, empty window with no elements at all except up in the top bar there’s a hamburger menu and a button that says “Do Something.” It’s perfectly rendered and kerned, it does something, as long as you want it to do the default something and you don’t want to so something slightly different. The Gnome Something Utility is called Something in all menus but the name of the executable is GSU and there’s no convenient way to find that out.
KDE is configurable but kind of homely. It’s damn near impossible to get two adjoining widgets to have the same font size and kerning. When you launch Komething, you are met by a baffling array of text boxes, radio buttons and drop-downs, there are menus and tabs, none of which are lined up quite right giving it a kind of Windows 98 era jank to it. You can do every kind of Something, Something Else and Something Completely Different under the sun. There are professional closed-source Something apps that don’t have the features of Komething, but it looks like a Half Life mod configuration wizard a teenager made in 1999.
Cinnamon is somewhere between those two extremes.
Also every two versions, Gnome will decide that the way Something used to be done was Bad, and Wrong, and we will never talk about it again, for now we will all embrace the new and inconvenient way of doing Something, which is clearly superior.
That’s the main thing I reject about Gnome. It’s not like the other girls.
Modern gnome sucks. gnome 2 was peak imo.
Which is what MATE is. It’s "No, we’re gonna keep doing Gnome 2.
Yeah, and I tried MATE but it just doesn’t hit the same. I mostly use cinnamon and xfce these days.
You are correct. But you are missing the most important button. Right in the middle of that table there is a big red button that says “autopilot - Manage all these things for me and I can play with a few of those other buttons, or all, or even none, and the rest doesn’t have to be touched by the user unless they want to”
Nice, so I can read all I want on keto?
Jnome, like gif.
that’s evil gnome, if written in Java
If gif is pronounced gif, then 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.
I love how you state that as a fact as if words like give, gift, gill, gibbon, giddy, etc don’t exist.
please tell me you call it JIT-HUB.
I do now.
Hi Jinny
Gi gives
You will also note that the pronunciation of gif is debated despite me saying it’s easy to pick up on.
Gift
It was a tongue-in-cheek response. The English alphabet doesn’t convey pronunciation.
Like the peanut butter?
Choosy moms choose gif.
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
TUBA - Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus
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.
oonderwater
It’s eunderwater
No it’s not
If they’d wanted us to call Itchio Itch, they shouldn’t have called it Itchio.
Similarly, if they’d wanted us to call Gnome Ganome, they shouldn’t have called it Gnome.
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).
English is a hideous mongrel of a language.
I was already an adult when I learned that “salmon” is supposed to be pronounced as “sammon”.
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.
Thanks for the painful laugh, Gugulethu
out of curiosity, do you speak another language than English?
I sure don’t!
ah, I was wondering because, in comparison to my native tongue (French), I’ve found English significantly more intuitive. I may be biased though, or French may just be another mongrel of a language 😅
My uneducated feeling so far is that most languages weren’t developed with particularly logical rules, and rules were added retroactively, and as such, most languages are ugly amalgamations, but English gets some of the worst rep because of its dominance on the internet.
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.
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.
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
deleted by creator
English is a mix and match of a bunch of other languages
If you add an “e” after the “G” then all of a sudden it’s Science!
I thought it was either gnome (as in garden gnome) or genome (as in genetics).
What the fuck is a guhnome
Wouldn’t you like to guhnome
Guhnome is for people that can’t make the back of the throat an nasal ng sound when saying ngnome
You’ve blinded me!
You just got gnomed!
was looking exactly for this
Meanwhile, me, a non-native English speaker:
One does not learn English the language, one simply memorises it
The G is silent in English words starting with gn. Gnarly gnats is pronounced narly nats.
There’s not a lot of those words anyway
Gnu and gnome are exceptions only when used to describe the software. The gnu animal and the mythical gnome creature are pronounced with silent gs.
The only way to learn what something sounds like as a non-native speaker is to look it up or listen to someone pronounce it. There are no rules – or at least no useful rules, because any rule will have many exceptions. Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There’s simply no making sense of it.
For example, in many British English dialects, the “a” in “can” and the one in “can’t” are pronounced completely differently, despite “can’t” being a contraction of “can not”. It’s literally the same word, just with a different word afterwords, and yet the two get different pronunciations. There’s no way to guess at that being the case, or come up with a logical reason why. You just have to accept it.
Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There’s simply no making sense of it. Well that is how dialects work
But a can of something?
