The feminine form, which is the one we have adapted in english and mispronounce as "fortay", is spelled "forte". LOL, no what's crazy is claiming that a bunch of nerdy computer programmers have some sort of grammar-gravitas. Once a word gets into a language it has a life of it's own, there's no dead hand control. Jacques Cousteau, being french, probably pronounced SCUBA as "scoo-BAH" back in the 1950's when it was first invented (by him). As the word evolved and dropped it's acronym status (in the 70's, supposedly), the pronunciation switched to "SCOO-ba".
Not only is the word mispronounced, it is mis-adapted. The french word by all accounts is the masculine fort. I don't dispute that langugage is a dynamic animal. Especially in todays fast paced society the English language is getting bastardized to hell. Nouns are getting 'verbed'. People come up with new meanings of ancient words seemingly just for the sake of it. I'm not totally against that but I'm on the other side of the fence when it comes to language manipulation.
I guess if during the first "adapatation", forte was used in english to describe a masculine noun or pronoun, or at least one that would translate to one in French, then it would have been mis-adapted, but who knows when or what that was? Anyway since most english nouns don't have the same gender concept anyway it's questionable whether or not it would be "wrong", I mean we might as well stick up for the ladies and let the feminine side get one.
I always spelled it out when I say it. That's what I originally did when I began identifying files according to their extension, so now it's a habit. G - I - F J - P - G
That's silly, man. To say "I will do it this way because it's a habit" is going against what has already been settled. So... right now... where did you post this? Is it "Clutchfans dot net", or "clutchfans dot ehn ee tee" ??
uhh, no, they created both. that would only apply if they never actually said the word aloud, which it appears they did. you invent a word and then verbalize it, then you invent the pronunciation. now if you wanna say that language is dynamic and can change and one day it will be proncounced differently and wrongly go ahead (the same way a huge portion of the world now writes "then" when they actually mean "than"), but don't BS us with this they didn't invent the pronunciation thing. perhaps getting this worked up over the pronunciation of the acryonym GIF (something i don't actually care about) is stupid, but that statement was pretty silly. the dwyane analogy was pretty good as far as i can tell.
Where is it written that the inventor of an acronym is forever the master of how it is pronounced? What if I invented a file format called "Yellow Adobe Online" or "yao" but then insisted it was pronounced "Ming". Would I be right or would the people who pronounced it "yao" be right.
As ridiculous as it may be, the creators would be right. Otherwise we would call Mike Krzyzewski, Mike Krazy-zooski, instead of Mike Sha-Shef-Ski.
Well, the letter G has a soft "g", so don't end that story just yet How do you pronounce 99 per cent of all file extensions? That's right - you say each letter individually Case in point: EXE is also an acronym (a pronounceable abbreviation), but if you say ax-file or eeks-file instead of ee-ax-ee file, you're a dork Which brings us to GIF. You can either say jee-eye-eff file, or shorten that into jeef file Or you can step away from your PC and go out to get some sun
