• circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Giff with a hard g.

    Yes there are many examples of soft g before i, like gist. But English orthography isn’t self-consistent, so ultimately all these arguments become reductio ad absurdam.

    G in GIF stands for Graphics. Period.

    I agree that g for graphics isn’t a terribly good argument one way or another. But the reductio ad absurdam part is the more important bit. All language, ultimately, is arbitrary, with successful information exchange being the only measure that really matters. It’s especially so for something like GIF that occurs far more often in text than speech.