What’s the story behind /etc/ as /etsy/?
Phonetically it’s pronounced “K-D-E-is-superior”
But hey, language is protean. It evolves and flows like a river, daddy-o.
Jnome, like gif.
If gif is pronounced gif, the gnome should be pronounced gnome
I call it Ubuntu.
I don’t know if I’ve had to say Gnome out loud before to another human person. I would go with the garden variety gnome myself.
For some reason I assumed it was G-NOME
Nginx should be pronounced ŋiŋks and rhyme with sphinx
I can’t even begin to know how to pronounce Nginx.
Engine X. I think.
I didn’t know that Elon Musk also wrote a webserver.
I only found that out within the last year. I’ve been pronouncing it like in-jinx for about a decade.
For those curious - it’s engine-x.
Meanwhile, me, a non-native English speaker:
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.
Real Gs pronounces Gnow-Em-Ee
It’s pronounced gee-nome, right?
G-gnome
I thought it was foot for a long time.
I thought it was KDE
If it makes anyone feel better, I watched a coworker write “sequel” in her notes while I was talking about SQL.
That’s actually cute, sometimes I wish I were innocent to the abomination of squeal
I use KDE because I never want to have to worry about how to pronounce it. There is no ambiguity with KDE, it’s just K D E
I’ve actually seen discussions online and met one person who said it’s “K-DE” (kay-dee), so it’s not a sure thing.
So now you’ll have to find something else, hehe.
Krazy person that was
Now pronounce Qt.
Well, that’s easy. That must be “Kut”, which, not surprisingly means cunt in Dutch.
Officially Cute, but for me it will always be cutie
Kiddie
Guess I’ll pronounce it Kh Duh from now on!
It’s pronounced kiddy.
Just KDEing…
No, it’s pronounced “Katie!” /s
But seriously, it almost is pronounced “Katie.”
My wife works at a bakery that uses an ordering system called FreshKDS (kitchen display system in case you’re wondering). She always calls it fresh kids.
Mine was studying global information stuff in school. Mainly used a software called “ArcGIS.”
I called it “Arc-jiss.” Which she laugh-hated because it sounds like “Arc-jizz.” XD
I don’t see that backfiring for someone who isn’t in the know.
We pronounce it Katie.
I am still thoroughly confused whether I should call it KDE or Plasma or Plasma Desktop. Like, what is the difference?
KDE is the author, Plasma is the application. There is ambiguity since they don’t make more than one desktop environment - so all are good.
But there’s no ambiguity in how to pronounce any of it
And it isn’t a tablet ui.
I use, and love, KDE, but this is not one of the reasons I use it… What
this is like the dude who invented GIF thinking everyone was going to call it “jiff”. it ain’t happening, broski.
It’s obviously pronounced “jif” just like giraffe.
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 pronounced gay-peg /jk
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.
animated palettised depictions of giraffes
So… where are these originals?
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.
Yeah, just like the U stands for oonderwater in SCUBA, or the P stands for potographics in JPG!
Welcome to… Jraphic Park!
That or Giraffe Interchange Format
This should be part of ISO
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
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.
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 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.
How’s Redis pronounced?
I say ree-diss because it’s redis as in remote dictionary server.
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. :/
What? The creator of GIF has made it very clear it is not pronounced Jiff.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We native speakers of German intuitively pronounce an audible “g” followed by an audible “n” when reading “GNOME” and find it weird that the ordinary word “gnome” is pronounced with a silent “g” in English. The cognate in our first language is “Gnom”, pronounced with two consonants in the beginning, like the desktop environment.
It wasn’t silent for me in UK, it was G as in the ng sound in the word sing so ngnome. The back of tongue at back top of throat rather than just starting with Nome that has N with tongue at front of mouth.
People who say guh -nome are the same sick psychos who pronounce GIF “Jiff”.
Knice to meat you
Found the KDE user!
That format was a gift to the world.
a gigantic and gargantuan achievement that enabled memes that make you giddy when you get the gist of their jokes
but yeah who cares what the dude says, language evolves and its pronounced gif now
or Jiraffe, Giraffe.
So all French people
French people are definitely psychos so that makes sense
As a non-native english speaker who thought I had finally grasped the english language can confirm I, in fact, hadn’t (I pronounce gnome as “guhnome” also as in “garden guhnome”, I had no idea)
How do you pronounce gnocci, gnat, etc? They may start with a ‘g’ but the proper pronunciation is just /n/.
I know to pronounce the italian gnocchi as ñoki (like it was also mentioned above) but believe it or not, people here pronounce it with like “guh-notchi” same in “guh-nat” It’s just some Slavic languages (I cant speak for all) pronounce every letter in words, so there is this tendency. PS: thanks for reminding me, the “g” in gnat is silent xD
