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[–] 13 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Nice gimmick. Counterpoint: this GIF of some giggly git giving a gilt gizzard and a large haggis to a giddy girl named Gidget. (GIF omitted because I made it tf up). Incidentally, not a single one of your examples included “gi” followed by “f”.

Incidentally, I pronounce it “jif”, I just think appealing to English as if it had actual rules is insane.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah I pulled it out originally because I was tired of people saying that "gi" is almost always hard g, and I don't think the lack of f makes a difference (because English spelling rules are silly, like you say. In the other thread I mentioned that just because the word "women" exists we don't pronounce every "wom" sequence with a short i sound).

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Not everyone pronounces "women" with a short i sound, it's regional and there are no arguments about the "proper" pronouciation. The word is clearly understood either way so it doesn't matter.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Yeah of course "proper" doesn't really mean anything when talking about idolects. I'm curious though--I've been trying to get more information about the /wʊmən/ pronunciation for awhile. Do you know what region it's common to? That pronunciation doesn't show up in any dictionary (or at least any American one) except wiktionary and whenever I search for it there's not much info about it. I'm trying to figure out if it's regional or a more recent trend spread across a younger group online or something.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Lmao, idk why anyone would claim that either. Re: the other part, I also don’t think there’s any inherent reason the “f”, but in my sleepy haze writing this last night I wasn’t able to think of an example with the soft “g” followed by “if”. I feel like it must exist but I’m too tired to find it.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    Looks like the only "normal"(ish) word that has the gif string is fungiform, and even that has both hard/soft g listed as pronunciations. There are also apparently a few long words like spongiferous and some biologic classes (as opposed to (eg) species) ending in -formes that happen to end in -giformes (like Archaeopterygiformes). But I wouldn't expect too many people to have those in their pocket during a discussion of -gif- words.

    https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-containing-gif

    https://word-finder.com/words-with/gif/

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