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Humble Gin (IMHO & GIF)


tater

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5 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

> GIF

How else?

'G'if as in 'g'olf.  That's how I always pronounced it (coming from a german background, I tend to pronounce unfamiliar things with a german rather than english ruleset unless it's obviously an english word). But yes, IM'H'O, 'H'umble.

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1 hour ago, micha said:

'G'if as in 'g'olf.  That's how I always pronounced it (coming from a german background, I tend to pronounce unfamiliar things with a german rather than english ruleset unless it's obviously an english word). But yes, IM'H'O, 'H'umble.

The guy who made it up says it like the spirit.

In Germany, do you pronounce "gin" with a hard or soft g?

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1 hour ago, tater said:

The guy who made it up says it like the spirit.

I guess that's the authoritative source then :)  I was just responding to the "how else" that there is an alternative possible pronounciation; not sure how widespread though.

1 hour ago, tater said:

In Germany, do you pronounce "gin" with a hard or soft g?

Soft 'g' because it's an imported foreign word. But if it -was- a native word, it'd have a hard 'g'.

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But why ? It's short form of graphics, not jrafics.

Same with router. It makes routes for things, like in route 66, not like in about.

It is probably better not to ask and just humbly accept :-)

Edit btw.: lichen like in kitchen in BE, bit like a like in AE.

It is a strange world ... and don't ask about small scale geographical differences in German. We have jokes about misunderstandings between Bavarians and people from the north.

Edited by Green Baron
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Isn't H just "honorable"?

 

45 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:
1 hour ago, cubinator said:

GIF is like Galaxy for me.

BLASPHEMY

Why? Maybe he pronounces "jalaxy".

 

11 hours ago, micha said:

Soft 'g' because it's an imported foreign word.

I pronounce "gif" like soft "g", too.
Because I (have no idea / don't give a snack) how English speakers pronounce this themselves (and as we can see, they aren't sure, too).
And because I pronounce nasty dialectal "gh" instead of proper literary "gg" and too lazy to retrain.
(Though a strange thing: speaking English I always pronounce "gg", not native "gh". Probably a mental keyboard layout switch.)

Edited by kerbiloid
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It's g as in garage.

Seriously, I can accept that the creators of format wanted it pronounced as gin, but they're just trolling us. It stands for graphics and therefore must be pronounced as such. That being said, I will openly make fun of anybody that pronounces it as gin in my presence.

 

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.gif as in "in a jiffy".

IMHO : "In My Honest Opinion".

 

And for "oh, non-proper pronounce given it's an acronym" ? Freak that ! English spelling is schite anyway. Why not winge it further.

Spoiler

Just if you want to know how English would be if it was to be pronounced in IPA :

 

 

 

Edited by YNM
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6 hours ago, Shpaget said:

It's g as in garage.

Seriously, I can accept that the creators of format wanted it pronounced as gin, but they're just trolling us. It stands for graphics and therefore must be pronounced as such. That being said, I will openly make fun of anybody that pronounces it as gin in my presence.

 

Nope. If you coin a word, you get to decide how it's pronounced. It would be correct for an Italian to make fun of someone saying Genoa instead of Genova, for example, even if the former is correct in English. You can mispronounce gif however you like, but it was coined with a soft g, and any other pronunciation is a variant, not the primary.

It's like Spanish place names in CA vs here in NM. Most in CA seem to be mispronounced in Spanish, they tend to be more correct here---but with exceptions. Mad-rid, NM is not pronounced as Madrid, Spain (my Spanish teacher in HS was from there, so I even "th" the ds vs the Spanish here in NM).

I should add that back when gif was how pictures were moved around on the early internet (back in the late '80s), I never heard any variation in how it was pronounced at all.

Edited by tater
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8 minutes ago, tater said:

You can mispronounce gif however you like, but it was coined with a soft g, and any other pronunciation is a variant, not the primary.

Language is an agreement between people on a method of communication. Sometimes this agreement is written down and formalized. That usually doesn't stay valid very long, though, because most often the agreement is intangible and constantly evolving.

The only primary pronunciation, syntax, meaning, or anything else is the one that is understood the best. As long as both /gɪf/ and /d͡ʒɪf/ are understood, neither is the primary or variant. Eventually, though, one will probably die out, and my money is on the survival of /g/.

Edited by MDZhB
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2 hours ago, MDZhB said:

my money is on the survival of /g/.

English people tend to not have a good retainment of inflections. Both consonants and vowels gets rounded. Like Cot-Caught merger and Woss, not Ross. /d͡ʒ/ is easier to pronounce than /g/.

But well, we'll see...

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9 hours ago, YNM said:

IMHO : "In My Honest Opinion".

Nonononono!!  In My Humble Opinion!  At least originally and this is also the opinon of the top hits on Google as well as urband dictionaries etc.  However, apparently a recent poll of english-speaking internet users (and I believe it was primarily US-based ones) had the "Honest" variant in the lead. So I guess it's an example of language fluidity in action.

IMH(umble)O is IMHO the nicer variant though - you are humbly submitting your opinion (which may or may not be fact) for consideration in an ongoing discussion/argument.

IMH(onest)O implies that your opinion is the correct one and can brook no further argument.

 

10 hours ago, Shpaget said:

It's g as in garage.

Lol - I see what you did here. Which 'g'? ;-)

As for GIF being coined as a word and it being up to the originator to define the pronounciation, it's not. It's an abbreviation (Graphics Interchange Format - GIF), so IMHO "pronouncing" an abbreviation is purely down to (local) conventions, pretty much like any english word. Especially when considering that english spelling isn't phonetic.

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GIF as in the j in jigger.

13 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Same with router. It makes routes for things, like in route 66, not like in about.

So.... a roooter? That sounds wrong to me........

And about the IMHO, yeah I only learned it as H(onest). I can accept H(umble) though. Sounds more polite too.......

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IMH(oly)O "gif" is pronounced like "gin."

Though I also am one of the few who still pronounce "gigawatt" correctly (like Doc Brown) so who am I to talk.

13 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Same with router. It makes routes for things, like in route 66, not like in about.

I actually pronounce "router" and "Route 66" differently, though I pronounce "route" however I feel like at the time. I think if talking about routes on a network, I'd tend toward the way I say "router" and if I recently referred to "Route 66" I'd say it like that.

I also pronounce "Caribbean" differently depending on if I'm talking about the actual Caribbean or the Disney ride, "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Gotta love English.

Edited by 5thHorseman
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2 hours ago, micha said:

IMH(onest)O implies that your opinion is the correct one and can brook no further argument.

Well, it's much like TBH. It's an opinion after all, to change or not to change depends on the holder (and whether you have convinced enough).

Also, (IMHo)nest rolls better than (IMHo)mble.

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As there is no [w] sound in my language, I have to pronounce "wmv" as [veh-ehm-veh] instead of correct [weh-ehm-veh].

Why not when "www" is pronounced as "veh-veh-veh".

***

IMHO (especially in upper register like here) the IMHO was invented by very unhumble people who:

  • replaced two words like "what if", or "but maybe", or "I think" with four;
  • accented that that's "I" who says this, "don't you all see it's my opinion?!";
  • mockingly simulated the humility to make the interlocator feel uncomfortable;
  • accented that this is "my opinion", "my position", "here is my hill of the king", not just "I think" or "It seems to me";
  • liked to make others to parse acronyms;
  • just trolled.

So, correctly it should be written and pronounced with a smile in the proper place:

Spoiler

IMH:DO

 

Edited by kerbiloid
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IMHO was originally "In my humble opinion" and meant either that they were taking a non-dogmatic stance, or that they were being sarcastic because they really were quite certain of themselves.

However, after the acronym "TBH" (which really doesn't serve anything more than a syntactic role in sentences) became popularized, standing for "To be honest", the definition of "H" in "IMHO" began to warp. For those who had been on the internet since its infancy, "IMHO" meant "In my humble opinion" and nothing more; for younger people who had seen the acronym but never knew what words it stood for, they interpreted it (and began using it) as "In my honest opinion".

In theory, this makes for a big problem. If one group of people is talking about honesty and the other group is talking about humility, and both groups misinterpret what the other is saying...well, that's linguistic anarchy! It would be as if half the internet understood "troll" to refer to a manipulative, inflammatory person while the other half understood "troll" to refer to those cute little singing creatures. How have we survived?

The answer, of course, is that "IMHO" has become sufficiently divorced from either "honest" or "humble" that it has developed a meaning all its own. Its use in a sentence is to set up and call attention to an opinionated statement; it has no more to do with humility or honesty (positively or negatively) than phrases like "on the other hand" or words like "anyway".

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