694
TIL When you hover over a piece of the phonetic notation on (English) Wikipedia, it shows you an example for its pronunciation
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
694 points (99.2% liked)
Today I Learned
25027 readers
711 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
When the guy that names it tells you how it's pronounced, that is the pronunciation.
I can think of other groups that intentionally mispronounce names to belittle others.
nope, that's not how language works. sure you can suggest it and people might go along, but you have no control over how words are said, especially if you don't use intuitive spelling.
Seeing as how it was a name of a thing created by a specific group of people, I call bullshit. If I invent a new thing and give it a name, that doesn't give a bunch of jackasses the right to steamroll over that because they don't like it.
lol. yes it does wtf are you on about. you can create something named VVYNN and say it's pronounced "fun", but it's up to people whether they do or not. in my experience they do when it makes sense. iphone makes sense. gif makes sense for some people, doesn't for others. you can't force it.
"Launguage is define by usage" blah. I'm not sure that tracks for proper nouns and things that are given names by a creator.
Why do people get upset when someone says Camel-a Harris? Do I live in the Un-nighted Sta-tees? Have you ever viewed "hey-peg" image? What about a "we - B - M" which replaced the Geef?
something in the back of your mind should tell you you're making stupid arguments when you start comparing persons with fucking file formats.
but since you're having a tough time with it, here you go: one deserves respect, the others don't. same with pronouns; I'll respect people if they tell me to use he, she or it, but if someone tells me this file format they came up with is a "she" I might slap them a little bit.
moreover things that see daily use will enter lexicon, so yeah proper name or not, it's part of language. look up genericized trademarks.
and finally, I already addressed this but you conveniently ignored my point in intuitive naming and started naming things in a stupider way than they're actually named to make your point sound more sensible rather than the actual case here in which the intended pronunciation is stupider and less intuitive than its spelling suggests.
if you want people to call your phone an iPhone, it helps if you spell it i-p-h-o-n-e and not a-y-v-ö-n. if it makes sense people will go along with it, if not, no one will give a shit what you want it to be called.
What a g-enius response from the g-entleman who thinks a proper noun refers only to names jiven to people, but not places, things, or ideas. I'm happy you wont incorrectly assign g-ender to a G-erman (or anyone else), but I fail to see how pronouns and proper nouns deserve different levels of respect.
Do you mean g-enericized trademarks like Joogle, or things like asprin, thermos, coke, or linoleum? All of which are pronounced the same as they were pronounced when they were only used as trademarks? "Entering the lexicon" doesn't change a pronunciation. People who can't or won't pronounce a word change pronunciations.
So every word used in the English language is intuitively named and pronounced how it's spelled?
The point I'm getting from you is that you don't like the way a name is spelled / pronounced, so you say it the way you think it should be pronounced, which is what I've decided to do with all words that begin with G in this comment. According to you, that is valid and I have pronounced everything correctly because "no one has any control over how words are said". So why bother wiht slpelnig nd prenunseeashun @ oll iff teh mesij iz kleer?
You and everyone else are joing to pronounce what you want how you want, and I jet that. That's ok. But don't try and push it as the "correct" pronunciation when the correct pronunciation is defined by the person who named the file format. "gif" is, at best, an alternate pronunciation of an already established word.
Despite our disagreement, I sincerely hope you have a good day.
the words you use as an example are irrelevant and look nothing like gif. see if you had thought about it a little you'd figure that people pronounce things based on the type of the word and syllable. German, gender etc are two syllable words. people say gif with a hard G because it's similar to words like give, get, gill, etc. now your argument, had it been good, would've instead involved words like gin and gib. they're less common but at least similar in structure. but there's my argument, it's more intuitive to read it similarly to give and get rather than gin and gib.
and the argument you give about intuitiveness are wrong on several fronts.
first of all, listing a bunch of words doesn't prove anything as every rule can have exceptions. just because some words aren't intuitive doesn't mean people won't gravitate towards reading intuitively. doesn't even make sense.
second of all, some of the words don't even fit the "unintuitive" description. colonel, sure, it's a stupid word with a stupid history. but knight? you know intuitiveness doesn't mean "read as written", it means it makes sense within the rules and exceptions of a language, for example i would easily know the k in knight is silent because I've seen tons of other words that have the same silent letter. know, knife, knock, knack... I guarantee that someone who is not familiar with one of the less common words that start the same way, say knave for example, would intuitively know how it's pronounced, and wouldn't really try to sound it out as "kuh-nave". same with phlegm.
third of all, these are not new words. my argument about coining a new word and expecting it to be read a certain way would place the onus on you to make it look like that's how it's read.
finally, because these are old words, some of them actually undercut your argument because the nonstandard pronunciation is the convenient one. knight lost the k later, when people found it more convenient that way. woden's day is now called "wensday"3 now because people find that more convenient not because Odin himself came down to Midgard to tell people this is how you're supposed to say the name... if even God names don't survive the convenience of the majority spekers, some fucking file format doesn't have a chance.
good day.
Well then why the can't GIF be GIF? Especially if the stated rule is the exception?
and germ, gene, gel, gist, gem, gym... Anyway, see your above quote.
Some rules are stupid and unintuitive. Sure it's not "read as written". But ask someone who is not familiar with and has never seen the word knave how to spell it. Adding a K would not be intuitive. Regardless, see your above quote.
Yes, old words have had plenty of time for the original pronunciations and spellings to be forgotten and warped between cultures and generations. We cant ask the creators of most words how they were pronounced and those creators (if indeed a given word can be tracked to one creator, as can GIF), who are long dead, no longer give a shit and it's unlikely that those changes were made in their lifetime. Do we know how they were pronounced in the past thanks to recorded history? Sure. Language changes over long periods of time. Like the climate, lots of small changing weather patterns over very long time periods creates a climate. People don't just wake up one day and collectively say "fuck this word in particular" only to have everyone who speaks that language just change their ways. It happens over very long periods of time. GIF has hardly had any time for the original pronunciation lost to the ages. In fact, the guy who made it up only died 3 years ago, and he specifically told you how to say it. You then learned of this, and decided you knew better because it's spelled funny for how it's pronounced and then forgot:
My chief complaint here is that when someone tells you how a word they have invented is pronounced, and you pronounce it differently on purpose, even if somehow your pronunciation was not objectively wrong, it's still incredibly disrespectful to the person who created it.
And so, GIF is pronounced "jif", even if that makes it an "exception".
The first time UFO was written about, the writer wrote out that it should be pronounced you-fo. Yet everyone spells out the letters. So basically the creator isn't always listened to. I see it as a case of when I say gif with a soft g then whoever is listening then has to use context to determine which one I mean. If I pronounce it with a hard g there is no ambiguity. Less ambiguity is more effective for communication so hard g wins for me.
Japan pronounces UFO as you-fo. It comes up more often than in English as well because those crane/claw machine games where you try to pull a prize out are called UFO catchers in Japanese.
I did not know this and think that is awesome lol
I understand what you're saying here and think that is very true for certain words lacking certain contexts, but I've never confused and ever met anyone who might confuse a peanut butter brand with a GIF in any context. Except maybe a GIF made by Jif, or a GIF of Jif.
The original name for "Island" did not have an 's' in it. Some scholar added the 's' as a stylistic choice to make the word look more Latin (despite not having a Latin root).
Unless you're also arguing with people that "It's spelled 'Iegland', because that's how it was originally named" you can STFU about how it was originally intended.
Sorry, I'm using language that has been changed from it's original intented form, let me fix that:
Þæt ǣrest nama þæs "Īglandes" næfde nāne 's' on him. Sum wita ēcde þæt 's' swā stīllic gecēosung tō macienne þæt word līcian Lǣden (þēah hit næbbe Lǣden wurt). Nymþe þū ēac winne mid folce þæt "Hit is gespelod 'Īegland', forþām swā hit wæs ǣrest genemned," þū meaht swīgian ymbe hū hit wæs ǣrest gedōn.
Did John Iland (legland?) see the first island and name it, then go around telling everyone how it was spelled and pronounced only to have it changed by some scholar? Or was it "Leopold the namer" who was like, "that is called an i-land, everyone! I invented it".
Sarcastic, but also a genuine question. Who named the first island an island? How did he or she popularize it and distribute their intended pronunciation and original spelling? Did people ask him, get a definitive answer, and say, "no that's wrong" to his face, like with GIF? Was the inventor upset by the change in spelling or did it happen hundreds of years after their death? Were they alive, do you think it would have bothered them that they were misspelling the word they invented?
This form of spelling began to change as English mixed with French during the Norman conquest. Among other things capitalism had an influence on the way words were written as typesetters were paid by the line, which incentivized them to make words longer.
Language changes over time (like looong periods of time) as cultures grow and merge and I recognize and respect that. What I don't respect when someone says, "I've made a really cool thing, and it's spelled 'like this' and called 'pronounced name'", only to have other people basically reply to them, "no that's stupid and you're stupid for suggesting it".
How much time is required before something is allowed to change?
When "Iegland" was first spelled as "Island" that was wrong. It was incorrect and stupid. It wasn't okay because "Iegland has been around long enough so we can change it now." It became correct because that is how people started using it.
It's not the amount of time, it's how language is used and understood.
However long it takes for something to be more or less universally accepted. GIF's pronunciation, despite being defined and sounded out for people, is not currently widely accepted in either pronunciation, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.
How is this different from the argument that GIF being pronounced with a hard G is incorrect and stupid? It was wrong then and over much time became right.
It takes time for linguistic changes to propagate and it doesn't happen because one person decides it should change. If you walked around back when island was first invented and said "nice island" to a bunch of leglanders, they'd think you were an idiot because there hadn't been enough time for people to start using it.
It is widely accepted in both pronciations. "Aluminum" has a different pronouciation in the UK then it does in the Americas. Both are correct depending on where you are. If you hear someone use the pronouciation you're not used to it might take your half a second to mentally adjust, but you'll understand just fine and can continue the conversation.
Correct. Over time the hard G became right because that's how it was used. Notice how I am not arguing the people should actually be using "Iegland".
Which is exactly what you are arguing for.
This reminds me of when people correct people on how to pronounce their own name based on how it is spelled. I have seen this happen so many times and it infuriates me.
Same, and I think that's my chief argument. Everyone like "language is always changing" which is true, but the guy was like "it's this. I made it, I named it, it's this." and everyone was like, "nah fuck off you're wrong about how to pronounce thing that didn't exist or have a pronunciation before you invented and name it."
When a .gif file tells me itself that it is pronouced "hif" then that is how I will pronouce it.