Referring to them as a company rather than “a group of people who wanted to replace GIF” is easier.

As for JPG/JPEG, JPG = Jay-Pee-Gee, JPEG = Jay-Peg or Jay-Pee-Ee-Gee (I would go with Jay-Peg).
MPG = Em-Pee-Gee, MPEG = Em-Peg.

It all makes sense and I am fine with pronouncing parts of it as words as long their spellings match what I am saying. If they want us to call it “Ping”, they should make it PING, not PNG. JPEG and MPEG have no problem being 4 characters long, so why does PNG, especially since they seem to want it to be?

If they want it to be pronounced as “PING,” they have full power in making it so with a very simple extra letter in the extension. Until then, they are just trying to be clever/cute. I prefer brute-force logic over attempts to be cute with pronunciations.

People do what they want, and what makes something "correct" is if society deems it acceptable.

I am not saying you are wrong, but I don’t agree it should be happening. Putting “ain’t” into the dictionary is like saying humans’ lack of desire to put any effort what-so-ever into proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, etc., is acceptable. It is not acceptable to be lazy. Same thing with “snuck”. Who cares that there is already a perfectly good and historically correct way to use the past-tense of “sneak”. “Snuck” is common so let’s just throw it into the dictionaries instead of trying to educate people.

Yes it happens, but it is not right, and I will never take part of getting a non-existent word put into the dictionary.


L. Spiro

And NASA is not pronounced... oh, wait.

NASA is an acronym. Your rebuttal fails.
You’d have made more ground by suggesting that some extensions are not abbreviations, but are meant to be acronyms. But you completely missed your chance and someone else had to make that point for you.

No, I just figured you'd be able to discover on your own that acronyms are, in fact, a type of abbreviation. Sadly, this was not the case.

Look at what else I quoted from your post:

Grammar dictates that abbreviations, which is what extensions are, should be pronounced letter-by-letter.

You can just as easily replace "extensions" with "acronyms" and it becomes abundantly clear that NASA is, in fact, a counterexample to the fact that "grammar dictates that abbreviations (...) should be pronounced letter-by-letter."

Not only did you try to sidestep this fact by nitpicking my post, you didn't even actually find anything valid to complain about.

Let me put this as simply as I can: talking about what "grammar dictates" and what is "acceptable" when a) the rules you cite are not in fact universal (such as that abbreviations "should be pronounced letter-by-letter") and b) you're only selecting the rules that you like (as evidenced by the fact that dictionary words that you find "lazy" ... don't count?) suggests to me that maybe everything you're saying is just post-hoc rationalization for your own subjective (and frankly idiosyncratic) ideas about how language should work.

Congratulations, you're a prescriptivist. Unfortunately you'll probably have, in the best case, about as much luck establishing your own special version of "correct" as everyone else who has tried to do so with English.

I didn't realize so many people were saying 'gif' with a hard G. Joke's on you, suckers.

I have to agree. I have never heard it with a hard G, and imagining it sounds…weird.

L. Spiro

How do you pronounce "gift"?

Gif, as in, don't gif me that crap. Indeed, if he wanted it to be pronounced "jif", he should have called it that. Some say, the inventor of something was entitled to call it anything he wants - sure, but then he also needs to write it that way, and not impose wrong or counter-intuitive pronunciation rules on people, or would you also obey if he said "gif is actually pronounced 'rabbit'" ? Well no thanks, mister, we fix that for you. Graphics has a hard G, period.

As for "ping", I generally refuse to pronounce acronyms which lack vowels as if they didn't. If the originator wants it pronounced like a word with the implied vowels, he better make it a word, and not create new english pronunciation rules at will. I won't have that imposed on me. Why isn't anyone calling BMP "bimp", btw? :-D Well, maybe some are... o_O

After all, the libpng website says: "PNG (pronounced "ping") is..." and the W3 PNG specification introduction says "PNG is pronounced "ping"" (and Wikipedia suggests "ping" as well, also saying the acronym "PING" ->; "PING is not GIF" is (if I'm reading this right) the father of the "PNG" extension)

If PNG is derived from "PING is not GIF" and GIF is supposed to be pronounced "JIF", doesn't that mean PNG should be pronounced "PINJ". ;)

gif me [...] Graphics has a hard G, period.

Though "graphics" is a bad example, "give" is a much better one.

English (and German, probably where English borrowed this nasty habit from) allows ? instead of d? in some places, without a clear, understandable reason (or rule).

Normally, and most languages don't make such obscure exceptions, g followed by "i" (or "e", to the same effect) is by definition d?. If you wanted "GIF" to be "gif me", you'd normally have to write it "GHIF" or "GUIF". That's why Lamborghini is spelled the way it is.

Now "graphics" on the other hand is crystal clear. There is no possible way to pronounce "g" followed by "r" any different from how it's done in "graphics".

I just don't pronounce them, just spell them in my own language (french) . Anyway, whatever...

Except gif, which I pronounce "geef" without a 'd' at the beginning and with a short 'ee'.

Basically, I pronounce them like if they were french acronyms.

if 'g' sounds always like in "gut" I should have said "jif"

In French , 'g' followed with 'e', 'i', 'y' is pronouncied like your 'j', 'g' otherwise

gif me [...] Graphics has a hard G, period.

Though "graphics" is a bad example, "give" is a much better one.

English (and German, probably where English borrowed this nasty habit from) allows ? instead of d? in some places, without a clear, understandable reason (or rule).

Well, at least in German it's not a nasty habit, German simply does not have a d? sound, it's always "hard G". So probably almost all words that English inherited from German follow that rule (hrm, not "German" *g*)

I didn't realize so many people were saying 'gif' with a hard G. Joke's on you, suckers.

I have to agree. I have never heard it with a hard G, and imagining it sounds…weird.

I have never, not once, heard anyone use the "Jiff" (or "Ping") pronunciations, aside from when they're reading these quirky articles about the fact that the author intended his G to be a J ("apparently giff is pronounced jiff"), so that it could work as a regional pun (we don't have "Jif" or "choosy moms", so his pun is not at all obvious, but g's default to being hard in our dialect, so "gift" is the obvious way to pronounce it).

I wasn't expecting anyone at all to tick the "jif" box, especially not around a third of you. You're all weird. Or French. Whatever.

P.S. Merriam Webster's audio example pronunciation uses a hard g, like normal people do, so it's now a science fact that it's acceptable.

The GIF author should gust jive up on his goke, godverdomme!

I wasn't expecting anyone at all to tick the "jif" box. You're all weird.

.... his goke ???? What do you mean ?