The author of Balatro pronounces it as one would the Latin word (assuming one pronounces Latin words as one is taught in Latin class), BAH-la-troh.
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He should’ve written it that then, because “ghibli” is a hard G in Italian. XD
Rush made the same mistake in “Red Barchetta”. It’s a hard C, so it’s pronounced [barketa]! Silly Rush, it’s the Italian diminutive for boat. XD
Only “eye-eff”, even for IFComp.
What about the IF Forum? Do people say “Int-fiction” (as I do), or the “if forum”, or “eye-eff forum”? Genuinely curious.
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In my head, I usually say “int fick for um,” but for a while there I used to say “rayf.” 
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I’d rather not have people describe Japanese phonetics as “corrupting” European names. It’s a different language with different rules, and I think it’s best the rules be respected for their own language. We twist Japanese names beyond recognition constantly because of the rules of English.
Transliteration often misses nuance of a language in any direction, it’s just the nature of transliteration/translation in general. “Ji-bu-ri" is the right pronunciation for Japanese, and Miyazaki is Japanese. The conversation around this feels like it’s turning subtly toward mocking and I would rather that not continue.
eta: I didn’t realize ghibli was an Italian word, and it’s a tossup whether I pronounce it “jibli” or “gibli” at any time. So already the rules of English are changing a European language word.
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Huh. For me, its “if comp”.
For the forums, it depends on if I’m referring to the specific site or the forums as a concept: so its the “int fiction” site (specifically intfiction.org) or “if forums”.
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To clarify the whole “Ghibli” thing: my understanding is that they wanted it to be sound as “Jiburi”, and if Wikipedia can be trusted on this 株式会社スタジオジブリ = Kabushiki-gaisha Sutajio Jiburi.
As I understand it, the italian “Ghibli” suffered a bit of corruption going into Japanese, where the hard G softened into a J, but it’s the sort of thing that happened over time and for a number of people, rather than “one guy messing up”. They definitely wanted the romaji logo to say “Ghibli”, and “Jiburi” is how they pronounced “Ghibli”. It so happens that that’s not how it would be originally pronounced.
You know something super annoying? I’ve heard many people in Portugal pronounce Apple (as in, the brand) as “ay-pple”. And I have no friggin’ idea why. Also, when I heard a colleague of mine from New Zealand pronounce Kiri Te Kanawa so differently from, like, everyone else (“kiri te KAnawa”, as opposed to “Kiri te-ka-NA-wa”) and telling me that Charlize Therone’s last name is actually pronounced very very very similarly to “Tron”…
…I accepted the fact that we are mucking up pronounciation a heck of a lot more than we think, and we probably will never know, and ultimately it may not really matter that much. It’s just something that happens.
We have this illusion that using the same alphabet allows us to divine pronounciation of different languages…
At any rate, Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced, apparently, Bouquet), shall always stand as a testament to the importance of Keeping Up Appearences by any means necessary.
(as a kid I never knew how to pronounce the name of two Davids that I really enjoyed seeing on screen: Duchovny and Suchet. And come to think of it, I’m still vaguely unsure on whether Gillian Anderson’s “G” is hard or soft)
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Or “Hastur.” ducking and running
The way I pronounce “Hastur”, I would half-expect someone to reply “Gesundheit”.
All I know is the image file format is pronounced “Jif” not “Gif”.
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“GIF” with a soft ‘g’ as “jiff” stands for the Giraffics Interchange Format, and is only used for pictures of giraffes.
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And let’s not even get started on “jigabytes”… which is actually how I say it because in PT the “gi” is always soft, I didn’t even need Christopher Lloyd to set me wrong on that one.
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LALALALA I can’t hear you. JIF JIF JIF
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Why are we still debating the pronunciation of gif when png can do everything gif can but better?
Also, I can’t speak for adapting words into languages other than English or Japanese, but I feel like English has a wide enough range of standard phonemes to handle most foreign words even if applying common English phonetics to the original spelling(e.g. you need to know that J often has an h-sound in Spanish words to pronounce jalapeno correctly) or the standard transliteration(e.g. most English fans of anime pronounce it kind of like annie may instead of ah knee may which is closer to the Japanese pronunciation, but an English speaker would have no trouble with ah knee may, though maybe a bad example since anime is a boomerang word(short for animeshon, the Japanese rendering of animation)… But there are a lot of common phonemes in English and other common European languages that just don’t exist in Japanese and lots of consonant clusters that are completely invalid in Japanese. At the very least, most of the time when I hear comparisons between how Japanese names are pronounced by native Japanese speakers and how they are pronounced by English-speaking fans, the differences are on the level of an accent one has to be paying attention to catch, but some of the cases of the Japanese borrowing English terms or adapting English names to theirmore limited phoneme set and allowed phoneme combinations sometimes render them unrecognizable and make it hard to even tell what the intended origin was.
Also, are their terms for the following:
-The set of languages that use the Roman/Latin alphabet or a variant there of as their primary writing system… And are there any languages in this group that aren’t either Germanic or Romantic?
the set of phonemes and phoneme combinations permissible by a language’s standards for pronunciation?
(emph mine)
It’s true, but it’s kind of cheating—most languages’ romanizations (transliterations into the Latin alphabet) are specifically designed around English consonants!
I don’t know a specific term; I would just call them “Latin-using languages”. But thanks to colonialism, there are tons of them across the world—most Bantu languages in Africa and most Polynesian languages in Oceania, for example, use the Latin alphabet.
The set of phonemes is the “phonemic inventory”, the combinations allowed are the “phonotactics”. Together, I’d call them the “phonology” of the language.
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I don’t see much of a difference between, for instance, “an English speaker has a hard time with ending a word with an open E-as-in-Echo, like ‘anime’, and will often turn it into an ‘ay’”, and “a Japanese speaker will turn ‘handkerchief’ into ‘hankachifu’” (being that, apparently, “hankachi” already appears to be the proper way to say it. I added the ‘fu’ for illustration purposes). The difference I see is mostly of scale, of “how much had to be adapted”, but the base is the same, and English has its own instances where it injects its own sounds (when you hear an American singer sing opera, you can usually tell by the “T”s, and sometimes the odd “e” will turn into “ey”).
My point - it kinda goes both ways. I am often very amused when I find such japanese words that clearly come from some other language, like “glass” –> “gurasu” / “garasu”; bīrugas (beer glass), wain-gurasu (wine glass). I actually think these words do an excellent job of capturing the sounds of the original. Being more comfortable in English, and indeed in Portuguese in my case, it’s easy for me to say “Oh, English and Portuguese both have a wide array of sounds and a system that allows me to pronounce pretty much anything”. But that’s simply not true; and when I look at some of the words that Japanese adapt them, from the sound, and I listen to them, I often go “Wow, that’s some amazing flexibility they get out of their sillabary”. So I don’t think they’re all that different.
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The first time I heard somebody else say it out loud was MC Frontalot saying “xyzzyfying”
Saying it as letters never occurred to me. But I was also very confused the first time I heard a coworker say “an eff-ay-queue” instead of “a fack”
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Huh. Thanks for sharing this. I never heard of this fellow before, and this thread is the last place I expected to be introduced to a rapper with an actually original flow, but I suppose this is the kind of stuff that happens when you say XYZZY.
-Wade
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I’ve been calling GIF files “JIFS” since 1988. I will die on that hill. 