I have an off-topic rant: I know it's "RISC FIVE" and not "RISC VEE" but as long as companies use letters to represent numbers it's my opinion they forfeit the right to complain that people aren't saying it right. Apple finally gave up and changed Mac OS "ex" to macOS; everyone else should follow suit.
interestingly enough, the “v” in risc-v also means “v” as in vector [1]
> and so we named it RISC-V. As one of our goals in defining RISC-V was to support research in data-parallel architectures, the Roman numeral ‘V’ also conveniently served as an acronymic pun for “Vector.”
I pronounce it with the hard "g", and I'd happily ignore the few people that pronounce it with the soft "g", except that the guy who invented the format intended it to be pronounced "jiff".
Yes. Being old, I remember. Well, considering that the "G" stood for "Graphics" and that "Graphics", in my native American English has a hard-g, I'm just going to declare the author of the format to be a troglodyte and go on from there. (Not that there's anything wrong with that - many of us tech-types are troglodytes and misanthropes and lack a classical education)
Thers's an idea - revise the expansion of the acronym to say
Giraffics Interchange Format. Make it an ISO standard and donate proceeds of sales of the paper version to protecting the giraffes. Problem solved.
It's still a very common English word that's spelled very similarly. One can hardly be surprised if people guessing at the pronunciation of "GIF" select a hard 'g'.
Sure. So English has some words which start with "gi-" which have hard 'g's ('gift', 'give', 'girl', 'giggle') and some which have soft 'g's ('giant', 'giraffe', 'gibber', 'ginger'), so both pronunciations are actually reasonable in English for the orthographic form 'GIF'.
I always say "risk-vee", and everybody knows what I mean.
I also say "macosix" and "windos" (and used to say "solarix") as generic alternatives to commercial trademarks.
Marketing departments can only propose pronunciation, they cannot dictate it, and they have no right or power to prevent inventing synonyms for the trademarks they control. They also have no authority over verbs, so e.g. "googling" is a generic term right out of the gate.
There won't be a RISC-VI, so it doesn't matter that it means "5" to some people.
