Not sure I'll bother to reprogram myself from “png”, “pung”, or “pee-enn-gee”.
So why can’t you do that with GIF or PNG? People that create things get to name them.
And if they pick something dumb enough other people get to ignore them.
You'll commonly call someone by their pronounced name out of respect, forced or given.
In a situation where someone does something really stupid or annoying and the forced respect isn't there, most people don't.
On inanimate objects: Aluminium was first ratified by the IUPAC as aluminium⁰, with the agreement of its discoverer Sir Humphrey Davy¹, yet one huge nation calls it something else…
On people: nicknames are a thing, are you saying those are universally wrong? But yes, when a person tells me that they'd prefer their name pronounced a different way, or that they'd prefer a different name entirely, or that they don't like the nickname other use for them, you can bet your arse that I'll make the effort to use their preferred name+pronunciation in future.
------
[0] Though it should be noted that aluminum was, a few years after, officially accepted as an alternate form.
[1] He initially called it aluminum in the first paper.
But also, no, not universally even for babies, especially when the name is something ridiculous like X Æ A-Xii where even parents disagree on pronunciation, or when the person himself uses a "non-specced" variant
Hard-g is wrong, and those who use it are showing they have zero respect for others when they don't have to.
It's the tech equivalent to the shopping cart problem. What do you do when there is no incentive one way or the other? Do you do the right thing, or do you disrespect others?
Naming is probably one of the few language areas that I think should be prescriptive, even while language at large is descriptive.
English has both pronunciations for "gi" based on origin. Giraffe, giant, ginger, etc from Latin; gift, give, (and presumably others) from Germanic roots.
Using the preferred one is just a matter of politeness.
Also, it's quite ironic to prescribe "linguistic prescriptivism" as wrong.
Wrt/ communication, aside from personal preference, one can either respect the creator, or the audience. If I stand in front of 10 colleagues, 10 out of them would not understand jif, or would only get it because this issue has some history now. gif on the other hand has no friction.
Ghengis Khan for example sounds very different from its original Mongolian pronunciation. And there is a myriad others as well.
