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Stop Your Glottis

Stop Your Glottis — In response to our GIF pronunciation pronouncement in FAQtoids 003, Joe Clark <[email protected]> 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.


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