You can pronounce “GIF” any way you like

An impressively silly debate resumed this week over the “correct” pronunciation of GIF. Steve Wilhite, who invented the format, prefers “jif”, and at the recent Webby Awards he shared this opinion (tongue presumably in cheek) through a projected GIF set to Richard Strauss.*

Mr Wilhite knows the OED accepts both common pronunciations, hard-g /gɪf/ as in gift and soft-g /dʒɪf/ as in gist. (As do other dictionaries and all right-thinking people.) But the lexicographers, he told the New York Times, “are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

End of story? Well, no. This is English: it’s messy. It misbehaves.

Centring around phonetic alphabets

Over at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, I’ve been writing about idioms and alphabets, specifically centre around and “SaypU”.

In Centring around a usage disagreement, I discuss the phrase centre around and the regular complaints that it’s somehow wrong or illogical:

Centre around has been in use for about a century and a half, and no one seemed to mind it until the 1920s. Then someone cried foul, or rather illogic, and since then many have found fault with its apparent contravention of mathematical propriety. Nowadays it’s a regular source of annoyance, some of it extreme: one reader said seeing it in an article sent her “screaming to Strunk and White”. I worry for her blood pressure.

Critics object that a centre is “technically a single point” (Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage) and you can’t physically centre around something. But if centres were single points, city centres would be impossibly crowded.

The problem lies with the tension between mathematical logic and idiomatic usage. (You can guess which side I’m on.) I’m also interested in what motivates people to say centre around, and I touch on that later in the post.

Do you use the phrase, avoid it, like it, hate it, or have no strong feelings either way?

*

Next: Can shared alphabets foster peace? follows up on a recent BBC report about a new phonetic alphabet, SaypU, whose creator hopes it can make the world more peaceful and harmonious. Historically this is nothing unusual:

Moral and political aspirations have motivated inventors of languages and other communication systems for centuries. Esperanto is perhaps the most famous. Its creator, Ludwik Zamenhof, was an idealist who felt the “heavy sadness” of linguistic diversity and believed it was “the only, or at least the primary force which divides the human family into enemy parts”. So he created Esperanto to foster communication and understanding between people of different languages.

But would speaking the same language really make people more inclined to get on? . . . [T]here’s no reason to assume greater communicative overlap would engender significantly more kindness and mutual consideration among people.

The post looks briefly at whether the project measures up in practical terms, and throws the IPA and Douglas Adams into the mix.

For older articles, see my Macmillan Dictionary Blog archive.

How do you pronounce GIF? Does it matter?

When Oxford Dictionaries named the acronym GIF (graphics interchange format) as their US word of the year (in its verb use), debates resurfaced over its correct pronunciation. The short answer is that both /gɪf/ and /dʒɪf/ are fine – you can say GIF with the hard g of gift or the soft g of gin. Or you can say the letters: “gee eye eff”.

Some people insist on soft-g GIF, as in “jif”. They say it’s “up to the creators”, and “jif” is what the format’s inventors indicated. But this presumes a non-existent authority: the creators don’t get to lay down a planet-wide law, nor does anyone on their behalf. Pronunciation develops through general agreement – it’s up to everyone who uses the term – and most people seem to prefer hard-g GIF.

Gi- is inherently ambiguous, pronunciation-wise. We have hard-g gift, gills, giddy, give and giggles, soft-g gin, giblets, Gilly, giant and gist.* (There’s a Scandinavian flavour to the hard-g set.) So it’s not surprising the pronunciation of a new gi- term would split this way. But there aren’t many gif- words apart from gift, so it’s not surprising either that hard-g GIF predominates. The g‘s origin in graphics is another factor in its favour.

But there’s no question both are acceptable: Oxford Dictionaries sanction both, as do Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary, each of them based on extensive data of what people say. There is more than one right way – there often is – and declaring otherwise doesn’t make it otherwise.

Soft-g GIF may gradually fade, or it may retain minor currency. A continued split would not be a problem. Millions of people pronounce schedule with a sh- sound; other millions go with sk-. Communication is roomy enough to contain such discrepancies, and if confusion arises people are smart and imaginative enough to figure it out. Though I can’t speak for Philosoraptor.

Out of curiosity, how do you pronounce GIF? Feel free to vote in this poll or to add your thoughts below.

*

* In phonetics, /g/ is a voiced velar stop and /dʒ/ is a voiced palato-alveolar affricate.

The Glottal Stop Hotel

I am tempted to hoist a /ʔ/ into the gap:

The glottal stop, which you hear between the vowels in uh-oh and in some pronunciations of water, is a sound familiar to most people but seldom referred to outside of linguistic contexts.

David Brett has a helpful introductory page about it, including audio files, while Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium has a lovely example of a glottal stop tattoo.

The glottal stop is not bad for you, and its IPA symbol is attractive, but all things considered the hotel owners would probably prefer a true or flap /t/.

[Photo is from Salthill, Galway, Ireland.]

The mamas & the papas in babies’ babbling

Babbling is a key stage in language acquisition. We can see where it fits into the overall progression in the following “very rough” table taken from Jean Aitchison’s The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics:

Language stage	Beginning age
Crying	Birth
Cooing	6 weeks
Babbling	6 months
Intonation patterns	8 months
1-word utterances	1 year
2-word utterances	18 months
Word inflections	2 years
Questions, negatives	2¼ years
Rare or complex constructions	5 years
Mature speech	10 years

After the cooing or gurgling phase from which it develops, babbling has a distinctly speech-like quality because it features “sounds that are chopped up rhythmically by oral articulations into syllable-like sequences”, as Mark Liberman describes it.

The sounds most associated with babbling are mama, papa, dada, nana and slight variations thereon — as for example in the well-known video of twin babies repeating dada (and dadadadada, etc.) to each other.

This is true of a great many languages from different language families and parts of the world. The remarkable correspondence can be seen in a list included in Larry Trask’s “Where do mama/papa words come from?”, about which more below:

A mouthful of [d]

In an essay about The King’s Speech for the Fortnightly Review, I wrote that the very familiarity of speech means we easily overlook how amazing its mechanics are. This occurred to me often while reading J.D. O’Connor’s superb Phonetics, a Pelican Original from 1973.

The book has a lovely paragraph on how the [d] sound in do is articulated. Complete description of such a sound is impossible because it would require mentioning an infinite number of features, so in general we note only those features that “seem to contribute substantially to the sound”.

Some of the following terminology might be unfamiliar, in which case refer to this diagram of the human vocal tract. Here, then, is [d]:

the lips are somewhat rounded (ready for the following vowel); the teeth are close together; the soft palate is raised; the tongue-tip is firmly in contact with the alveolar ridge and the sides of the tongue are in continuous contact with the sides of the palate; the back of the tongue is raised to approximately the close vowel position (again ready for the vowel); air under pressure from the lungs is compressed within the completely stopped mouth cavity and pharynx; the tongue-tip (but not the sides or the back) then lowers suddenly allowing the compressed air to escape with a slight explosion; just before the explosion the vocal cords start to vibrate in normal voice and continue to do so into the vowel.

Professor O’Connor says that although this description may seem quite comprehensive, it is very far from complete. But it serves its basic and practical purpose. [Edit: Note the two references to readiness for the following vowel. The mouth assumes different shapes for [d] depending on what comes next. To see (or feel) this for yourself, prepare to speak do, da and dee but stop before the vowel.]

It’s also a very pleasing account of an act most of us perform more or less identically, yet uniquely, every day without a moment’s thought. Think of how much exquisite unconscious coordination goes into a full sentence, or a week’s worth of conversation. How fortunate we are to have this facility.

O’Connor (1919–1998), known familiarly as “Doc”, taught phonetics at University College London; John Wells’s obituary in the Guardian describes his lectures as “witty and effortlessly informative”, which I can believe, and his writing as “elegant and readable”, to which I can attest.

A list of O’Connor’s many publications may be found on Jack Windsor Lewis’s website.

Online IPA keyboards

Tomasz P. Szynalski, an English-Polish translator, has created TypeIt, a useful website for typing phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Text can be entered in a range of fonts and with special characters, marks and glyphs from other languages.

/’vɛri ‘hændi ɪn’diːd, ɘnd fʌn tɘ juːz/

I don’t know when it was developed – recently, I think. There are many websites with charts, explanations and audio files of IPA, but few that are designed for immediate online transcription. I like Richard Ishida’s, Weston Ruter’s, Paolo Mairano’s and this Phonemic Chart too, but it’s good to have options. Another: i2Speak.

Thanks to Lauren Hall-Lew, who brought TypeIt to my attention on Twitter.

[Note: I've edited this post slightly to add a couple of IPA tools that were mentioned in the comments.]