Gif vs jif? Isn't that like asking "Do you pronounce it like it's pronounced or like a different word is pronounced"
Are you from Wales?
Language is constantly evolving.
I assume they just don’t notice the difference, like with marry/merry/Mary.
Wikipedia agrees that this is common: "In North America it is often pronounced with a short vowel sound /krɛɡ/, as in "egg"" [1]
Not the same thing at all. This is more like someone following different pronunciation rules insisting that your name as spelled is pronounce "Kee-lay"; and if you actually want "Kaa-il", you should spell it K-A-I-L instead. It kind of makes sense that way too, as long as the rules are somewhat consistent in their version.
If the creator wanted to name it after Jif, the extension and name should have both been JIF. Putting in a G instead of a J is begging to create confusion about the pronunciation.
Both patterns exist in the language.
These are both words pronounced really differently, though. Give is a hard 'g' short 'i', jive is a 'j' and a long 'i'.
I'd like to add 'Gaol' or 'Jail'? Debra vs Zebra (These are pronounced differently in the US).
Yes that is my point.
You're implying that there should be a logical correspondence between how English words sound and how they're spelled. I'm not convinced that is true.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gist%2Cjist&ye... makes me wonder just what happened around 1840. I suspect https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_the_Little_Frenchman_Wear... (uses jist regularly as a misspelling of just) may have something to do with it.
So many people come up with so many fake rules for why it should have a hard G, but there are only two real rules for names, and, yes, GIF is a name (of a format). 1) If the named thing can't speak for itself, the people who named it dictate how the name is pronounced. 2) If it can speak for itself, it dictates. Nobody who isn't the named thing or its namer(s) gets to say how its name is pronounced regardless of what they think of the spelling.
That's obvious anyway; gift is one word (well, also give) swamped in a sea of other gi- words.
And gift is a very strange one. What is it, a loan from Norse? You'd think, if it were a native word, that it would have turned into something more like "yift", the way we see in e.g. day, I, or yard.
[1] This one's not Norse.
Consider the changes of people's names as they migrated around the world. In NZ, we pronounce Craig as "Crayg", in the US they pronounce it "Creg", which I struggle to make sense of, but that doesn't make it wrong. There are better examples than Craig but that was the first one that came to mind.
I agree with everything you said except that bit, it’s megawrong
I feel like it doesn't make sense, because then Greg should be spelled Graig, but that's the whole point, language evolves in an inconsistent way, and the only defining point of correct pronunciation is really "how do the majority of people say it", and that is often only a regional thing too.
Either way, the assertion that because something is a name it cannot evolve in pronunciation is easily disproved.
...you are aware that "gibbon" isn't pronounced with /dʒ/?