Nobody invented the mispronunciations, it just happens, which is why the manual included a guide. The inventor of the word (and the format) had to tell people how it was pronounced and why he chose the name, just like every other brand name.

What is recent is the fallacious arguments related to how acronyms are supposed to be pronounced, part of a larger trend towards obstinate and belligerent defense of an objectively and demonstrably false argument. The internet has made people feel like their opinions are just as valid as facts.

In the 90s, we nerds used technical terms like a shiboleth to separate other nerds from what the French call “les incompétents.” But it’s unlikely anyone would have corrected you back then, because doing so was considered impolite and elitist.

I see it as part of what Colbert called “truthiness.” There is no rule for how the word should be pronounced, but it feels like there should be, which is why the argument is so often repeated. The feeling of being right is more important than the reality of ambiguity, and people seek out validation of their presuppositions. It’s that overconfidence that fosters animosity towards debate, which is why people get so heated about silly things like this.

There are, there are just exceptions. For example, an e at the end of the word is silent. I’m certain you can give me a word where it’s not, but there are at least six in this paragraph alone where it is.

One of the most common words with a final “e” in that paragraph is “the” which not only has a final “e” sound, but has two different final “e” sounds depending on the context: “the end” uses a /ði/ pronunciation but “the word” uses a /ðə/ pronunciation. English is very stupid.

But, I agree with your assessment. English has rules, or at least patterns. “G” is most often hard, not soft, because “J” is available for the soft version, but there’s no alternative for the hard version. English tends to follow patterns, and “gift” has a hard g, and it (and words based on it) are the only ones that start with “gif”, so every “gif” word is hard. Because “t” (unlike “e”) can’t change the sounds before it, the pattern says that “gif” should have a hard “g”.

If it were “gir”, then there would be more debate. The word “giraffe” has a soft “g” but “girl” has a hard one, so the pattern is more muddy.

Also, people who coin words don’t get to decide how they’ll be pronounced. They can certainly try, but they’ll often lose. There are plenty of words in English borrowed from other languages that not only sound nothing like the original language, but that sound nothing like they’d sound if they were English words. For example, “lingerie”. It’s a French word, but the English pronunciation sounds nothing like a French word. In fact, if someone just sounded out the word as if it were an English word, they’d probably get much closer to the French pronunciation than the awful “lawn-je-ray” which is the current accepted English pronunciation (though, they’d probably assume a hard “g” sound).

In this case, it’s too bad that Steve Wilhite didn’t have a background in linguistics or he would have realized that people would see “gif” and assume a hard “g”. It was a losing fight from the start because he either didn’t understand the assumptions people would have when they saw those letters, or he thought that somehow he could successfully fight the tide all by himself.

If understanding is also the only metric then a hard g would still be preferable. Not only does a written g tend to make people lean to a hard g in my experience, but there’s more words that could be mistaken for a soft g pronunciation.

What? That’s just a silly claim, the word “gift” is generally pronounced [gɪft̚] with the /t/ having no release, often the last consonant isn’t even perceived by speakers, if anything that is extremely easy to mix up with “gif” using a /g/ as opposed using a /dʒ/, compared to any other words (well I guess there’s “jif” the peanut butter brand?). You make a bad argument.

Also yes, if someone pronounced or used a word one way and then went to some theoretical place where everyone else pronounced or used it in a way where it becomes mutually unintelligible, then yes you WOULD be saying it “wrong” if you insisted on pronouncing it in a way nobody can decipher it, if you can call anything in language “wrong”. French speakers can’t just go say shit to Sicilian speakers and expect to be understood.

But no, there are no rules about word construction or pronunciation. The closest thing we have to “rules” is loose standards that people commonly us. And in the context of this conversation, most English standards don’t invoke any sort of phonemic spelling like e.g. Spanish or French or Polish or Korean or whatever. There are no “spelling rules” that dictate that a certain sequence of letters or words has to be pronounced a certain way regardless of context, even according to standards of English. None of that “exceptions” bs, Modern English spelling is mostly based off of a writing system of a language that Modern English speakers wouldn’t even understand, and as such there are only a few sometimes-consistencies-ish, like using certain constructs to differentiate lax vs tense vowels like doubling the following consonant letter vs appending an “e” at the end, when applicable. It’s just infeasible due to the history of the writing system to apply a consistent convention for phonemic spelling without reforming the entire orthography.

This is opposed to, say, French, in which standard spellings have actually consistent throughout the entire language rules for how a certain combination of letters is formally pronounced (regardless of how much French speakers like to claim their spelling is nonsense), sometimes with secondary/uncommon pronunciations, and with exceptions to those rules. And consistent rules for phenomena like liaison. And applying those rules, you can systematically pronounce a majority of words accurately even if you’ve never encountered the language in your life. Here’s a table just for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography#Spelling_to_sound_correspondences

This is not something you can do in English.

And even using the argument of standards, the most common descriptions of Standard English (e.g. Oxford’s dictionaries, Merriam-Webster, AHD) all list both /gɪf/ and /dʒɪf/.

Also you claim that the latter is falling out of favor, but that seems to have come from thin air. All the resources on the matter in the first place are online polls with a small sample size and a lot of bias in terms of the location of the respondants from like a decade ago, idk how you determine that one is more popular than the other in a way other than “I hear X pronunciation more than Y”. The fact that this argument is seen all over the internet and is extremely contentious should be proof enough to show you that that claim is fallacious.

I’ve never had the problem of not being understood. And regardless of how long the time period was, there was a time when one guy spoke aloud the word when he invented it. You can use the new pronunciation if you like, but I use the original, as I have for 30+ years, and I will continue to do so because both are acceptable. If you don’t like it, that’s a you problem.

I’ve been saying gif with a soft g for over twenty years. Telling me not to is what makes English worse. As far I’m concerned both pronunciations are valid.