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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Don’t worry, I was being 100% facetious! After all, γ is generally believed to have been a hard /g/ in Ancient Greek, which is the version of Greek that “graphic” is based on and is CLEARLY the wrong way to say gif :D

    Kinda sorta un-jerking (but not really) for a moment, I don’t think that I’d include the rhotic in your hypothetical pronunciation in NASA and thus would say /neɪ.sə/ over /neɚ.sə/. I also don’t palatalize the U in SCUBA (/sku:.bə/, not /sk^(j)u:bə/), but I suspect that’s just a dialectical difference.

    Edit: I just saw your NZ lemmy instance name and now I understand the vowel choices. Cheers!


  • Well, you see, the g in gif stands for “graphics” which is ultimately from Greek “γραφικός,” and because this is the 21st century, γ in front of a close front vowel is pronounced as neither /g/ nor /d͡ʒ/ but rather /ʝ/, which is pronounced a bit like English’s y, so in its purest rendition gif is really pronounced “yiff”, which doubles as homage to the online communities that OP frequents.