Proper nouns have no requirement to be capitalized in modern English. It’s a proper noun and a product.

Island isn’t a proper noun, nor a product.

Your arguments are inane. Please stop talking to me.

You’re just changing the conversation. You said “the closest word is gift… that’s the conclusion most come to”. Which is just not provable. The reason the number is so high for hard g (I have a different survey that says 51% in that same year) is because people like you thinking that you know the “rules” of English and then telling everyone to pronounce it hard g. So their first encounter with the word is literally someone pronouncing it wrong. It has nothing to do with them associating it with “gift”.

Edit: you’re not even the person I was talking to so you’re definitely stepping in and saying things that have nothing to do with the convo.

Grease.

We’ve solidly been talking about English this whole time, since the entire basis for the pronunciation is that it’s a play on an English advertisement “choosy developers choose gif”. I’m not going to argue with other languages. Just like with the dude that is pulling out Ancient Greek, if anyone still speaks that they yeah they can pronounce Nike differently, otherwise it’s a translation to English.

Oh good! Someone that thinks there’s multiple ways to pronounce it. Thankfully wiktionary only has a single IPA pronunciation for both the shoe and the brand and they’re the same. ˈnaɪkiː. Though I do appreciate you pulling out the Ancient Greek pronunciation as a “gotcha”.

By your and Tom Scott’s reasoning, everyone exposed to it then would use the soft g,

No by Tom Scott’s explanation (not reasoning, he was stating actual science and scientific studies) exactly what has happened would have happened. People hear the word with a hard g and they forever associate it that way, even if it isn’t correct. It has nothing to do with how people think it should be pronounced or even the way that makes most sense to them. It’s about former associations with other words grabbing your mind at that moment and clicking. Doesn’t matter if you look back at it later and think (oh soft g makes sense cause it’s the peanut butter). You’ll already have the hard g stuck.

I think that’s the conclusion most come to and why the hard G is the most common.

You’re literally just making up things at this point. Just because you thought that does not mean even a slight minority thought or thinks that.

Fuck yeah, what a great song and game and show. Man I miss that shit.

And it’s a skull, cause it’s a future self portrait.

No I didn’t, you’ve misread.

Thankfully I think most people are idiots who wouldn’t be able to name what their operating system is so I also don’t give one shit what they think Reddit is either. Turns out most of the population can’t use a dictionary or we wouldn’t be calling idiots Nimrods.

Gif is a proper noun and a computer product. It’s not a simple word like “arse”. This would be like people saying Nike should be pronounced “Nick” and the company “Nike” is yelling “no it’s Nike! Like the god!” And people are just like, “nah I don’t care what you want your company to be called, I’m calling it something else.”

They’re not unintuitive. Just because you think that doesn’t make it true. Tom Scott has a whole video on the topic, essentially however you first associate that word is how you think it should be pronounced. That doesn’t make it unintuitive, as would be evidenced by the pretty much 50/50 split of usage for soft g vs hard g for years. I had huge arguments about this back in like 2016/7 and it literally was a 50/50 split. Might have changed since then, but that doesn’t mean jack shit about intuitiveness.

I mean, the pronunciation of proper nouns doesn’t follow other rules of language. If the creator is still alive and is telling you the correct pronunciation then that’s the pronunciation. It’s a product, a proper noun, not a simple word.

In this case, he chose to name it GIF which is, believe it or not, pronounced gif in the English language. If he wanted to have it sound like jif, he should have named it JIF.

Incorrect. There are ZERO rules that decide whether a word starts with a hard g or a soft g.

That’s just incorrect. Multiple studies have shown that how you think a word is pronounced is based on other words you know, not what the actual pronunciation is. When I first saw the word gif, I pronounced it with a soft g. Turns out that’s the correct pronunciation (because it’s a product name, not a random word) but if I had happen to have heard a hard g word more recently then I probably would have thought it was pronounced the wrong way.

I looked at a lint roller and I’m pretty positive I have no clue what licking that would be like

Because the words inside an acronym have no bearing on how the acronym is pronounced. And in this case, it’s not just as acronym. It’s a product name, where the creators get to choose to name it whatever the fuck they want. “Choosy developers choose gif”. So there’s plenty of reasons it should be using a soft g and zero reasons it should be using a hard g.