Stop Your Glottis -- In response to our GIF pronunciation pronouncement in FAQtoids 003, Joe Clark <joeclark@interlog.com> wrote us a stern note about phonology that makes everything much clearer.

There is no such thing as a hard or soft g, no matter what your second grade teacher told you. The sound represented by g in the word gift is a voiced velar stop, while the sound represented by g in the word gentle (and GIF) is a voiced palato-alveolar affricate. Calling these phonemes hard or soft g is like telling your mom you just bought a computer with 20 MB of storage and 2 GB of memory.

Permanent article URL: http://db.tidbits.com/article/4485
This is a specially formatted version of this TidBITS article that removes colors, and optionally removes images; it's designed to minimize the use of ink and paper.
Unless otherwise noted, this article is copyright © 1997 TidBITS Publishing, Inc.. TidBITS is copyright © 2008 TidBITS Publishing Inc. Reuse governed by this Creative Commons License: http://www.tidbits.com/terms/.