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"GIF" as in giraffe, btw.
You forgot the biggest pronunciation hijack of the century.
If the inventor of .GIF was a linguist, maybe we would have used his suggestion. .GIF is a file format. JIF is a peanut-butter.
Gerraffe it is.
Some words that begin in gi have a j sound and some have a g sound. There’s no rule. English just be like that.
There’s giraffe and there’s girl.
There’s gibberish and there’s gibbon.
There’s gigantic and there’s gigabyte.
There’s ginger and there’s gingham.
The whole debate on GIF is dumb. Both pronunciations are acceptable. I would say it like gift personally, but there’s no reason to think that gif- has to sound like g vs j. There’s just no rule for it in English.
It's one of the few playful arguments left in this world, I think. If there is one that can still be had online, it's probably this one.
To be honest, I pronounce gif like "gif" or "gif" depending on my mood.
While my personal bias is in the creators favor, it doesn't seem to me that GIF is even a proper word to begin with. It's an abbreviation and a format extension. As such, there aren't any rules that should be applied even if there were rules that could.
File extensions have such a wide variety of pronunciations it makes "gif" irrelevant anyway. (Is it E-X-E or is it "ex-ee"?)
I've always disliked these short and sweet justifications for one pronunciation over another as there's a million justifications that can go either way.
Here's an arguably more more apt example considering it contains every letter from the original acronym: "GIF" as in gift.
In my opinion, go with the one the causes less confusion. There's already a brand using the "JIF" pronunciation and nothing else using the "GIF" pronunciation so I prefer the hard G pronunciation.
The developers of PNG at least documented the pronunciation right from the start: ping
I still call it P N G