I’m wondering if we’ve gone too far in the gild the lily direction at this point
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Packed to the gills with examples at this point.
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Indeed, a ginormous number of examples
…of words starting with a hard “G” with an “I” or “E” following it. Depends on their etymology.
Now, the word in question is standard, and, as I said, in English there are plenty of exceptions. Double G is its own rule. No giggling, girl!
Back to elementary school:
I learned a lot in my kindergarten through high school education, but one thing I never figured out is hard and soft consonants. Hard and soft vowels I understand.
But how does one remember which G is hard and which is soft? What about C?
Not rules like “if it’s following an ‘i’ it’s soft”… no I mean like is the G in gift the hard one or the soft one?
I usually just say “G like GIFT” or “G like GIRAFFE” because I have no idea which type of G the adjective “soft” describes.
I must have been sick the week they taught that in school.
I think a hard C is the one that sounds like K and the soft C is the one that sounds like S???
But G’s particularly confound me.
Giraffes gingerly gazed at the glittering gems, giggling gleefully as they gracefully galloped through the giant ginger garden.
Courtesy of chat gee pee tee, or, if you’re European, chat geh peh teh.
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I read that in Jamie Tartt’s voice.
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Um, right there.
All one needs to know, for English, are the exceptions, which, from what I read on the internets, are not Latin or Greek in origin.
(“gynecology”, as an exception for even THAT rule!)
I’d promise to look up more, but I’d probably renege on that.
(“renege” being a poor choice of spelling decision (IMO) at some point, dropping the “u” that would make it obvious that it is a hard “g”.)
wiki is our friend:
In English orthography, the pronunciation of hard ⟨g⟩ is /ɡ/ and that of soft ⟨g⟩ is /dʒ/; the French soft ⟨g⟩, /ʒ/, 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 ⟨g⟩ pronunciation occurs before ⟨e i y⟩ while the hard ⟨g⟩ pronunciation occurs elsewhere.[2] 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 ⟨e i y⟩ as well. The orthography of soft ⟨g⟩ is fairly consistent: a soft ⟨g⟩ is almost always followed by ⟨e i y⟩. The notable exceptions are gaol (now more commonly spelled jail) and margarine (a French borrowing whose original hard ⟨g⟩ softened for unknown reasons, even though the name Margaret has a hard ⟨g⟩). The soft pronunciation of algae, the only one heard in North America, is sometimes cited as an exception, but it is actually conformant, ⟨ae⟩ being an alternate digraph spelling for a vowel in the ⟨e i y⟩ family.[2] Though this pronunciation is listed first in some British dictionaries, hard pronunciation due to misinterpretation of orthographic ⟨ae⟩ is widespread in British English and is listed second or alone in some British dictionaries. In some words, a soft ⟨g⟩ has lost its trailing ⟨e⟩ due to suffixing, but the combination ⟨dg⟩ would imply the soft pronunciation anyway (e.g. fledgling, judgment, pledgor).
Digraphs and trigraphs, such as ⟨ng⟩, ⟨gg⟩, and ⟨dge⟩, have their own pronunciation rules.
While ⟨c⟩, which also has hard and soft pronunciations, exists alongside ⟨k⟩ (which always indicates a hard pronunciation), ⟨g⟩ has no analogous letter or letter combination which consistently indicates a hard ⟨g⟩ sound, even though English uses ⟨j⟩ consistently for the soft ⟨g⟩ 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-⟨g⟩ sound. This additionally leads to many words spelled with g ⟨e i y⟩ and pronounced with a hard ⟨g⟩, including what may be the most common g ⟨e i y⟩ word “get”. It has also resulted in the file format GIF having two possible pronunciations, with both hard ⟨g⟩ and soft ⟨g⟩ in common use.
wiki is also our annoying friend who knows everything:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_words_where_G_is_pronounced_exceptionally
y’all are a bunch of 
s!!!
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You just learned that today?
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My mother taught me that words with Latinate roots use a soft g before i and e, and words with Germanic roots use a hard g.
And yes, “Germanic” is a Latinate word.
This rule almost always works. Of course, you need to know the origin of the word. 
Also
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So is gif Germanic or Latinate?
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Neither, it’s a pure neologism. That’s the point.
That one kinda infuriates me. It should be a hard g but it is a soft g.
Are there any other neogolisms that are really abbreviations where when the word is pronounced it doesn’t use the sounds of the words it is abbreviating?
Edit: I had it backwards.
Yes, they are apparently fairly common.
But the only argument for soft g is that the guy who invented it prefers that. Otherwise, it looks an awful lot like gift. I think people who tend to see more Latinate words like to pronounce it jif, but most English-speakers prefer gif, with a hard g.
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Apparently you a) aren’t supposed to use bleach to clean up the blood after killing someone, and b) tons of people somehow seem to think that this is common knowledge. Not sure what that says about society.
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Good to know. Might have to memorize it though, as it’s not a good idea to Google “murder scene cleaning products” if you forget the brand when you need it.
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I think thats because there have been dozens of CSI-type TV shows over the last two decades.
They were usually very popular (I used to watch the “original” CSI and then CSI: Miami and CSI: NY)
There was an episode of the original CSI where the murderer used a crap ton of bleach on a carrying case to hide evidence of blood.
Note to self: get Oxy!!!
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