Hard and soft G

A slide with a black background. The text written in white and all caps is: "It's pronounced 'JIF' not 'GIF'".

Steve Wilhite's slide at the 2013 Webby Awards regarding the pronunciation of GIF.

In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, the letter Template:Angle bracket is used in different contexts to represent two distinct phonemes that in English are called hard and soft Template:Angle bracket. The sound of a hard Template:Angle bracket (which often precedes the non-front vowels Template:Angle bracket or a consonant) is usually the voiced velar plosive (as in gain or go) while the sound of a soft Template:Angle bracket (typically before Template:Grapheme, Template:Grapheme, or Template:Grapheme) may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft Template:Angle bracket is the affricate Template:IPAslink, as in general, giant, and gym. A Template:Angle bracket at the end of a word usually renders a hard Template:Angle bracket (as in "rag"), while if a soft rendition is intended it would be followed by a [[Silent e|silent Template:Angle bracket]] (as in "rage").

History

This alternation has its origins in a historical palatalization of which took place in Late Latin, and led to a change in the pronunciation of the sound before the front vowels and . Later, other languages not descended from Latin, such as English, inherited this feature as an orthographic convention. The Scandinavian languages, however, have undergone their shift independently.

English

In English orthography, the pronunciation of hard Template:Angle bracket is and that of soft Template:Angle bracket is ; the French soft Template:Angle bracket, , survives in a number of French loanwords (e.g. regime, genre), [ʒ] also sometimes occurs as an allophone of [dʒ] in some accents in certain words.

In words of Greco-Latinate origin, the soft Template:Angle bracket pronunciation occurs before Template:Angle bracket while the hard Template:Angle bracket pronunciation occurs elsewhere. In some words of Germanic origin (e.g. get, give), loan words from other languages (e.g. geisha, pierogi), and irregular Greco-Latinate words (e.g. gynecology), the hard pronunciation may occur before Template:Angle bracket as well. The orthography of soft Template:Angle bracket is fairly consistent: a soft Template:Angle bracket is almost always followed by Template:Angle bracket. The notable exceptions are gaol (now more commonly spelled jail) and margarine (a French borrowing whose original hard Template:Angle bracket softened for unknown reasons, even though the name Margaret has a hard Template:Angle bracket). The soft pronunciation of algae, the only one heard in North America, is sometimes cited as an exception, but it is actually conformant, Template:Angle bracket being an alternate digraph spelling for a vowel in the Template:Angle bracket family. Though this pronunciation is listed first in some British dictionaries, hard pronunciation due to misinterpretation of orthographic Template:Angle bracket is widespread in British English and is listed second or alone in some British dictionaries. In some words, a soft Template:Angle bracket has lost its trailing Template:Angle bracket due to suffixing, but the combination Template:Angle bracket would imply the soft pronunciation anyway (e.g. fledgling, judgment, pledgor).

Digraphs and trigraphs, such as Template:Angle bracket, Template:Angle bracket, and Template:Angle bracket, have their own pronunciation rules.

While Template:Angle bracket, which also has hard and soft pronunciations, exists alongside Template:Angle bracket (which always indicates a hard pronunciation), Template:Angle bracket has no analogous letter or letter combination which consistently indicates a hard Template:Angle bracket sound, even though English uses Template:Angle bracket consistently for the soft Template:Angle bracket sound (the rationale for the spelling change of "gaol" to "jail"). This leads to special issues regarding the coherence of orthography when suffixes are added to words that end in a hard-Template:Angle bracket sound. This additionally leads to many words spelled with g Template:Angle bracket and pronounced with a hard Template:Angle bracket, including what may be the most common g Template:Angle bracket word "get". It has also resulted in the file format GIF having two possible pronunciations, with both hard Template:Angle bracket and soft Template:Angle bracket in common use.

Suffixation

When suffixes are added to words ending with a hard or soft Template:Angle bracket Template:Not a typo, the sound is normally maintained. Sometimes the normal rules of spelling changes before suffixes can help signal whether the hard or soft sound is intended. For example, as an accidental byproduct of the rule that doubles consonants in this situation after a short vowel, a double Template:Angle bracket will normally indicate the hard pronunciation (e.g. bagged is pronounced , not as ).

There are occasional exceptions where alternations between the hard and soft sound occur before different suffixes. Examples are analogous (hard) vs. analogy (soft); similarly, prodigal with prodigy. These are generally cases where the entire word, including the suffix, has been imported from Latin, and the general Romance-language pattern of soft Template:Angle bracket before front vowels, but hard Template:Angle bracket otherwise, is preserved.

Sometimes a silent letter is added to help indicate pronunciation. For example, a silent Template:Angle bracket usually indicates the soft pronunciation, as in change; this may be maintained before a suffix to indicate this pronunciation (as in changeable), despite the rule that usually drops this letter. A silent Template:Angle bracket can also indicate a soft pronunciation, particularly with the suffixes -gion and -gious (as in region, contagious). A silent Template:Grapheme can indicate a hard pronunciation in words borrowed from French (as in analogue, league, guide) or words influenced by French spelling conventions (guess, guest); a silent Template:Grapheme serves a similar purpose in Italian-derived words (ghetto, spaghetti).

A [[silent E|silent Template:Angle bracket]] can occur at the end of a word – or at the end of a component root word that is part of a larger word – after Template:Angle bracket as well as word-internally. In this situation, the Template:Angle bracket usually serves a marking function that helps to indicate that the Template:Angle bracket immediately before it is soft. Examples include image, management, and pigeon. Such a silent Template:Angle bracket also indicates that the vowel before Template:Angle bracket is a historic long vowel, as in rage, oblige, and range. When adding one of the above suffixes, this silent Template:Angle bracket is often dropped and the soft pronunciation remains. While Template:Angle bracket commonly indicates a soft pronunciation, the silent Template:Angle bracket may be dropped before another consonant while retaining the soft pronunciation in a number of words such judgment and abridgment. Also, the word veg, a clipped form of vegetate, retains the soft pronunciation despite being spelled without a silent Template:Angle bracket (i.e., pronounced as if spelled vedge). Similarly, soft Template:Angle bracket is sometimes replaced by Template:Angle bracket in some names of commercial entities, such as with "Enerjy Software", or "Majic 105.7" in Cleveland, Ohio and some names commonly spelled with Template:Angle bracket are given unusual soft Template:Angle bracket spellings such as Genna and Gennifer.

Letter combinations

English has many words of Romance origin, especially from French and Italian. The ones from Italian often retain the conventions of Italian orthography whereby Template:Angle bracket represents hard Template:Angle bracket before e and i and gi and ge represent soft Template:Angle bracket (often even without any semivowel/vowel sound, thus representing /dʒ/ just as j usually does in English orthography). The ones from French and Spanish often retain the conventions of French orthography and Spanish orthography whereby Template:Angle bracket represents hard Template:Angle bracket before e and i and gi and ge represent soft Template:Angle bracket (often realized as /ʒ/ in French and as /h/ or /χ/ in Spanish). A consequence of these orthographic tendencies is that g before o or a is almost never soft Template:Angle bracket in English—one way in which English orthography, which is generally not especially phonemic or regular, displays strong regularity in at least one aspect. A few exceptions include turgor and digoxin, for which the most common pronunciations use soft Template:Angle bracket despite the lack of "softness signal" gi or ge. But both of those words also have hard Template:Angle bracket pronunciations that are accepted variants, which reflects the spelling pronunciation pressure generated by the strong regularity of the digraph conventions.

A number of two-letter combinations (digraphs) follow their own pronunciation patterns and, as such, may not follow the hard/soft distinction of Template:Angle bracket. For example, Template:Angle bracket often represents Template:IPAslink (as in ring) or as in finger. The letters Template:Angle bracket, when final, represent , as in orange; when not final their pronunciation varies according to the word's etymology (e.g. in danger, in anger, in banger). In most cases, Template:Angle bracket represents Template:IPAslink as in dagger, but it may also represent as in suggest and exaggerate. (The same pair of facts can also be said of how Template:Angle bracket relates to hard and soft C, as, for example, in succinct and flaccid.) Other letter combinations that don't follow the paradigm include Template:Angle bracket, Template:Angle bracket, and Template:Angle bracket.

The digraph Template:Angle bracket is sometimes used to indicate a hard Template:Angle bracket pronunciation before Template:Angle bracket (e.g. guess, guitar, Guinness), including cases where Template:Angle bracket is silent (e.g., rogue, intrigue, catalogue, analogue). In some cases, the intervening Template:Angle bracket is pronounced as /w/ (distinguish, unguent).

Other languages

Latin script

All modern Romance languages make the hard/soft distinction with Template:Angle bracket, except a few that have undergone spelling reforms such as Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) or Haitian Creole and archaic variants like Sardinian. The hard Template:Angle bracket is in almost all those languages (with the exception of Galician, which may instead be a voiceless pharyngeal fricative), though the soft Template:Angle bracket pronunciation, which occurs before Template:Angle bracket, differs amongst them as follows:

• in Italian and Romanian
• in French and Portuguese
• in Catalan
• or in Spanish, depending on the dialect

Different languages use different strategies to indicate a hard pronunciation before front vowels:

• Italian and Romanian writing systems use Template:Angle bracket (e.g. Italian laghi, Romanian ghìd),
• French, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese orthographies use a silent Template:Angle bracket (e.g. French guerre, Catalan guerra, Spanish guitarra, Portuguese guitarra). With the exception of Portuguese, a trema over the Template:Angle bracket is used to indicate that it is not silent (e.g. Spanish vergüenza is pronounced , with both a hard Template:Angle bracket and non-mute Template:Angle bracket).
  • In Portuguese (especially Brazilian Portuguese) this was also used until the most recent orthographic reform (the new orthography now being compulsory in Brazil after a 2009-2016 transition period). The new orthography maintains the Template:Angle bracket for a hard g, but there is no marking of whether the Template:Angle bracket is silent; the reader must already know the pronunciation of words with a Template:Angle bracket (or Template:Angle bracket) digraph (previous: guitarra vs pingüim, current: guitarra and pinguim).

A soft pronunciation before non-front vowels is usually indicated by a silent Template:Angle bracket or Template:Angle bracket (e.g. Italian giorno, French mangeons), though Spanish, Portuguese, French and Catalan use Template:Angle bracket as in jueves.

Several North Germanic languages also make a hard/soft distinction. Again, the hard Template:Angle bracket is in most of these languages, but the soft Template:Angle bracket differs as follows:

• in Swedish before Template:Angbr
• in Norwegian before Template:Angbr
• in Faroese before Template:Angbr, but not before Template:Angbr

Icelandic orthography is a bit more complicated by having lenited pronunciations of Template:Angle bracket.

In German, the g is mostly a hard g, also before e and i: geben (to give), Geld (money), Gier (greed), Gift (poison, venom). Soft g occurs in loanwords, usually preserving the original pronunciation. So in words of French origin like Orange (orange), logieren (to lodge) or Etage (floor), the g is pronounced as ; words taken from English like Gin or Gender use the -sound. However others, such as agieren (act, agitate), Generation (generation) or Gymnasium (academic high school), are pronounced with a hard g. Some pronunciations vary by region: The word Giraffe is pronounced with a soft G in Austria, but with a hard G in Germany. The g in Magnet is pronounced as a hard g, but the gn in Champagner is pronounced like the French gn in champagne. The letter combination ng is usually merged to a velar nasal, and the g is not spoken in its own right; e.g., in the German word Finger, it is not audible as in the English word finger. However, when those letters are pronounced separately, as in compound words like Eingabe (input) or also in verbs like fingieren (to feign), both the n and the hard g is clearly audible. There are exceptions in loanwords like French-derived rangieren (to rank, to shunt), spoken with a velar nasal and a soft g ().

Other languages typically have hard Template:Angle bracket pronunciations except possibly in loanwords where it may represent or .

The orthography of Luganda is similar to Italian in having a soft Template:Angle bracket pronunciation before front vowels (namely Template:Angle bracket) and Template:Angle bracket indicates this soft pronunciation.

Because Esperanto orthography is phonemic, Template:Angle bracket always represents a hard g; a soft g is represented by the accented letter [[Ĝ|Template:Angle bracket]].

The Vietnamese alphabet does not have a hard or a soft Template:Angle bracket per se. However, since it was inherited from European Romance languages (Portuguese and Italian) except the diacritics which were from Greek; the letter Template:Angle bracket never occurs in "soft positions", i.e. before Template:Angle bracket, Template:Angle bracket and Template:Angle bracket where the digraph Template:Angle bracket (colloquially known as gờ ghép "composed Template:Angle bracket") is used instead. Likewise, the trigraph Template:Angle bracket (ngờ ghép "composed Template:Angle bracket") also replaces the digraph Template:Angle bracket in those positions. "gh" can be explained as following Italian convention, and "ngh" as a form of analogy. However, there still is Template:Angle bracket which is considered a digraph on its own, shortened to Template:Angle bracket before Template:Angle bracket, even in the word gì.

Other scripts

In Modern Greek, which uses the Greek alphabet, the Greek letter gamma (uppercase: Template:Angle bracket; lowercase: Template:Angle bracket) – which is ancestral to the Roman letters Template:Angle bracket and Template:Angle bracket – has "soft-type" and "hard-type" pronunciations, though Greek speakers do not use such a terminology. The "soft" pronunciation (that is, the voiced palatal fricative ) occurs before Template:Angle bracket and Template:Angle bracket (both which represent ), and before Template:Angle bracket, Template:Angle bracket, Template:Angle bracket, Template:Angle bracket, and Template:Angle bracket (which all represent ). In other instances, the "hard" pronunciation (that is, the voiced velar fricative ) occurs.

In the Russian alphabet (a variant of Cyrillic), Template:Angle bracket represents both hard (твёрдый ) and soft (мягкий ) pronunciations, and , respectively. The soft pronunciation of Template:Angle bracket occurs before any of the "softening" vowels Template:Angle bracket and the hard pronunciation occurs elsewhere. However, the letter Template:Angle bracket functions as a "soft g" in the Romance sense, with alterations between Template:Angle bracket and Template:Angle bracket common in the language (e.g. ложиться, "to lie (down)", past tense лёг; подруга, "girlfriend", diminutive подружка). In other Slavic languages, there are similar phenomena involving Template:Angle bracket (or Template:Angle bracket) and Template:Angle bracket (or Template:Angle bracket).

In Modern Hebrew, which uses the Hebrew alphabet, the letter gimel (Template:Angle bracket) typically has the sound within Hebrew words, although in some Sephardic dialects, it represents or when written with a dagesh (i.e., a dot placed inside the letter: Template:Angle bracket), and when without a dagesh. An apostrophe-like symbol called a Geresh can be added immediately to the left of a gimel (i.e., Template:Angle bracket) to indicate that the gimel represents an affricate ).

See also

• English orthography
• G
• Hard and soft C
• Hard and soft G in Dutch
• Pronunciation of GIF