Spyke
lemmy.world

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.

33
lemmy.dbzer0.com

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?

15

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.

24

animated palettised depictions of giraffes

So... where are these originals?

2

Yeah, just like the U stands for oonderwater in SCUBA, or the P stands for potographics in JPG!

14
lemmy.world

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.

7

And this is why Sonic and Shadow never sit down together for thanksgiving

3
Harvey656reply
lemmy.world

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?

9

The privilege in living in a normally German talking country is that we don’t have the gif and regex problem

2

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. :/

1
Zaphodreply
discuss.tchncs.de

What about HiFi though? The Fi comes from fidelity, yet it's pronounced like the fi in finite.
English is weird

7

You can start pronouncing it correctly. There are so many English accents, why not have one that pronounces words how they should be pronounced?

2
gon [he]reply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

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.

4
5765313496reply
lemmy.world

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".

1

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.

1

To be fair once you make a word from an acronym, it doesn't really matter what the pronunciation of the individual words was.

15

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!

4
MehBlahreply
lemmy.world

Except of course we did then and we do now. Too bad none of you ever looked at how G can be pronounced.

-4
MehBlahreply
lemmy.world

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.

-5
Gerudoreply
lemmy.zip

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.

14

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.

-4
lemmy.world

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.

7
MehBlahreply
lemmy.world

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.

4

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.

3
Raireply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

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

1

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.

1
lemmy.ca

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.

3

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.

3
MrSmithreply
lemmy.world

The other guy told me it's called X, but I still pronounce it Twitter.

3
MehBlahreply
lemmy.world

Thank you for that pointless attempt at comparison. They never changed the name of gif nor the pronunciation of it.

1
discuss.tchncs.de

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).

28
lemmy.world

I was already an adult when I learned that "salmon" is supposed to be pronounced as "sammon".

37
ladreply
programming.dev

I think, e is silent in baked and not in naked. But that's kind of like Sean Bean

5

I've been pronouncing naked as baked for a while now. Thankfully it doesn't come up in conversation as often.

2
mander.xyz

Funny you mention Germanic languages, given how deterministic German itself is on pronunciation of letters.

2
mander.xyz

Gotcha. I wish more languages were like German in their adherence to letter-phoneme pairing.

3

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.

2
piefed.social

If you don’t pronounce the p in pterodactyl or psychiatrist then lose my number

11
lemmy.world

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.

8

And then there are the cases where two consonants combine to form another sound entirely: ph, ch, sh, th.

3
lemmy.ca

People who say guh -nome are the same sick psychos who pronounce GIF "Jiff".

40

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

7
lemmy.world

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)

2
mercreply
sh.itjust.works

How do you pronounce gnocci, gnat, etc? They may start with a 'g' but the proper pronunciation is just /n/.

2
lemmy.world

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

4

My mother tongue very rarely completely mutes the sound of letters. More often, they are just deadened. So I can't help but pronounce a little bit of G at the beginning of those words.

4

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

39
InFerNoreply
lemmy.ml

It's pronounced kiddy.

Just KDEing..

24
lemmy.world

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.

15

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

6
feddit.nl

I am still thoroughly confused whether I should call it KDE or Plasma or Plasma Desktop. Like, what is the difference?

7
Derpgonreply
programming.dev

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.

10

But also the desktop environment used to be called KDE until 2009 (Kool Desktop Environment)

5

Well, that's easy. That must be "Kut", which, not surprisingly means cunt in Dutch.

2

I use, and love, KDE, but this is not one of the reasons I use it... What

2
M137reply
lemmy.world

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.

2
lemmy.world

I feel like if I’m pronouncing any Linux package for the first time, there’s some tongue-in-cheek “um, actually” trap hidden just around the corner for some self-righteous geek to correct you with a big smirk on their face because they get to feel smarter, which I used to be guilty of, but try to cut back on as much as I can these days.

It’s a fun joke at first, but I kind of got tired of it after a while, and just decided that politely educating in context and ignoring it otherwise feels way nicer.

36

I’ve never met anyone who took this seriously in real life. Like they know what you mean and will joke about the pronunciation. But I read a lot more about these holy wars online.

5

One does not learn English the language, one simply memorises it

9
bstixreply
feddit.dk

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.

5

It's even more confusing because in my native language (Dutch), we have those words too ( gnoe and gnoom ), and we do pronounce the g.

Of course, no Dutch speaker would ever miss the opportunity to pronounce a g :)

2
mercreply
sh.itjust.works

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.

3

Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There’s simply no making sense of it. Well that is how dialects work

1
lemmy.world

If gif is pronounced gif, then gnome should be pronounced gnome

22
lemmy.ca

Gi gives the g a j sound. Like gist, gibberish, giraffe, giant do at least that one is easy to pick up on.

0
pyrereply
lemmy.world

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.

5

You will also note that the pronunciation of gif is debated despite me saying it’s easy to pick up on.

0

It was a tongue-in-cheek response. The English alphabet doesn’t convey pronunciation.

1
lemmy.ca

Phonetically it's pronounced "K-D-E-is-superior"

But hey, language is protean. It evolves and flows like a river, daddy-o.

31
OR3Xreply
lemmy.world

KDE MFs be like, "it's very intuitive." Meanwhile it looks like this:

12

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"

9
sh.itjust.works

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.

5
lemmy.world

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.

3
OR3Xreply
lemmy.world

Modern gnome sucks. gnome 2 was peak imo.

2

Yeah, and I tried MATE but it just doesn't hit the same. I mostly use cinnamon and xfce these days.

2

Ahh! Home!


Just need to paint all panels and table surfaces black and highlight the knobs and dials.

2
lemmy.zip

If it makes anyone feel better, I watched a coworker write “sequel” in her notes while I was talking about SQL.

29

That's actually cute, sometimes I wish I were innocent to the abomination of squeal

24

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.

21

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.

3
Bigfishreply
lemmynsfw.com

In Italian "gn" sounds like a brief "nyuh" or "ny" like in gnocchi.

So "nyome".

11

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

19
lemmy.world

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.

15

I used paint(dot)net back when I still used Windows. After making the full switch to linux, I now use Krita, and have GIMP installed because it handles certain file types better than Krita. I cannot begin to describe my hatred over GIMP and how it's a necessary evil in the world of image editing for anything that isn't png, jpg, or webm.

2
lemmy.world

That's the whole gimmick behind GNU projects... You pronounce the G. Because that's how you pronounce GNU.

13
sh.itjust.works

I was hoping I wasn’t alone. I pronounced it genome for years before some neck beard took me to task for it. They also were mad at me for pronouncing CentOS like DOS (centahs rather than cent oh ess).

7
antimongoreply
lemmy.world

I also used to pronounce Gnome this way.

I’ll add I used to say “deb eye ann”, for Debian

And used to say “uh lie us”, for alias

I didn’t have a lot of people to talk about Linux with lol

7

To be fair, Debian is a portmanteau of Debra and Ian so most people don’t pronounce it the way Ian Murdock intended.

5
lemmy.ca

If you add an "e" after the "G" then all of a sudden it's Science!

10

Guhnome is for people that can't make the back of the throat an nasal ng sound when saying ngnome

2
Xellareply
lemmy.world

I can't even begin to know how to pronounce Nginx.

6

I didn't know that Elon Musk also wrote a webserver.

6

I only found that out within the last year. I've been pronouncing it like in-jinx for about a decade.

5

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."

8
fibojolyreply
sh.itjust.works

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!

2

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.

2
Bazooglereply
lemmy.world

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

4
Bazooglereply
lemmy.world

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

2
lemmy.zip

I thought it was foot for a long time.

7
lemmy.world

English had the g sound until people got lazy and skipped it. So...

5
sopuli.xyz

I have absolutely no idea how "Linux" is supposed to be pronounced. True story.

4
Skullgridreply
lemmy.world

goddamnit. You can lead an american to water, but you can't make them drink. Yes, technically speaking, in english he would pronounce his name as "Lie-nus". The correct pronunciation of the word that is his name is Li-nus. Some people choose to adapt their name to the audience they are talking to so that the audience has an easier time understanding or saying their name. But the actual way that name is pronounced correctly is different than the manners they are presenting.

Based on how he pronounces his name in his native tongue (and a neighboring country) the correct pronunciation , if you are looking for it, would be Li-nuks. If you want to pronounce it using the compromise he is kindly offering to people who can't pronounce anything properly, then you should call it Lie-nuks, but then again, you might as well pronounce it however the fuck you want and keep being wrong; the point of asking how you should pronounce something is to improve yourself and the way you say words.

Source : I had my name butchered whenever people try to pronounce it. I go by shortened versions that avoid the "difficult" part.

1

I don't whats worse, having your name constantly butchered, or having to deal with a copywrite dispute with the 3 other people in the room with the same name for ownership of it.

2
fedia.io

Here’s a helpful mnemonic: “Jet Li got eczema from radiation poisoning”

Li - as in Jet Li
nu - as in nuculer radiation
x - as in eczema

Li-nu-x

edit: spacing

7
Worxreply
lemmynsfw.com

Using "nuclear" as an example of how to correctly pronounce a different word is a bold choice

4
piefed.world

I pronounce it the usual way, but in the back of my mind (I keep forgetting to look into it), I've wondered if the "I" was originally intended to be pronounced like "Linus".

1
fitgsereply
sh.itjust.works

In early versions of Linux when manually setting up your sound card, Redhat came with a test audio clip of Linus Torvolds saying “I province Linux as Linux”. Even though it is named after him he did not pronounce it like his name: Ly-nix.

2

Every time i hit that pronunciation my brain flies straight to G'home g'nomes

4

It would seem gnome is the correct pronunciation. GNU naming conventions are a pipe dream.

3
lemmy.dbzer0.com

I think the real reason it's pronounced Guh-nome, is because there are no silent letters in acronyms.

It's similar to the reason why SQL sounds like ess-cue-ell instead of a version of he word sickle that sounds like there was a submarine imploding in your mouth.
Singular letters are important in acronyms and always pronounced distinctively. And if they're vocally strung together, that's still distinctive.

3

I am a self-taught CS guy, I and many others who didn't hear it spoken default to "ess-cue-el"

5

Yes, but that is, from a certain linguistic perspective, mispronouced. That was it's literal name as an acronym at one point though.

3
Derpgonreply
programming.dev

Three letter acronyms are the most I am willing to pronounce separately. More than that - if it doesn't have an obvious correct pronounciation, maybe the author should've used their brain instead of some dumb not so straightforward pronounciation.

5

That's an initialism, not an acronym.

Though the guy you're replying to is saying initialisms shouldn't exist past 3 letters, soooo...?

2
lemmy.dbzer0.com

SQL is an initialism, not meant to be pronounced as a word. Acronyms are supposed to be pronounced as a word, like C.H.U.D (pronounced "Chud," stands for Cannibalistic Underground Humanoid Dwellers). For an example of the former, A.T.M is an initialism short for Automatic Teller Machine (or Ass To Mouth..).

3

When I got into Linux I didn't know how gnome was pronounced (either the DE or the ornament), so I just stuck with it.

2

I personally pronounce it with a hard G even when talking about the mythical creature because that's how it's pronounced in most other languages that have a similar word. Anglos can go fuck themselves with their needlessly complicated phonetics.

2