ylai @ ylai @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform

English has been the total outlier among (originally) European language with no body of authority over its spelling. Even the “reform” by Noah Webster never really caught on outside North America, nearly 100 years later. And even more curious, the somewhat authoritative Oxford English Dictionary disagrees in their spelling with everybody (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling).

Nearly every single word in English that starts with a g followed by a soft ih/eh vowel is pronounced as a soft g, just a few:

That is patently not true and blatant cherry picking, e.g. already contradicted by the lexically matching word “gift” (and there are “giggle”, “gild”, “girl”, “git”, “give”, “gizmo”, etc.). See Wikipedia, which referenced linguists studying this:

An analysis of 269 words by linguist Michael Dow found near-tied results on whether a hard or soft g was more appropriate based on other English words; the results varied somewhat depending on what parameters were used.[11] Of the 105 words that contained gi somewhere in the word, 68 used the soft g while only 37 employed its counterpart. However, the hard g words were found to be significantly more common in everyday English; […]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_GIF#Cause

Michael Dow is an associate professor in linguistics with specialization in phonology, by the way.

and if you’re confused why others pronounce it with a soft G, they would seem to be simply more familiar with the English language 🤷‍♂️

Well, clearly you are already not as “familiar with the English language” as you might think.

Just see https://time.com/5791028/how-to-pronounce-gif/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_GIF#Analysis_of_the_dispute

• People who had math in high school and have seen blackboard bold/double struck characters

GCC, back in the days DJGPP in particular. As a child in the 1990s I could not afford the big name compilers like Watcom. And compared to DJGPP, all the “prized” Borland/Turbo stuff that my middle school pushed (with segmented real mode), were practically Fisher-Price and Mattel compilers.

Thanks, and sorry for the late response. One place to check is the outer casing of the battery female plug. But I am not very confident that it is not floating.