Lmao, idk why anyone would claim that either. Re: the other part, I also don’t think there’s any inherent reason the “f”, but in my sleepy haze writing this last night I wasn’t able to think of an example with the soft “g” followed by “if”. I feel like it must exist but I’m too tired to find it.
Looks like the only “normal”(ish) word that has the gif string is fungi, and even that has both hard/soft g listed as pronunciations. There are also apparently a few long words like spongiferous and some biologic classes (as opposed to (eg) species) ending in -formes that happen to end in -giformes (like Archaeopterygiformes). But I wouldn’t expect too many people to have those in their pocket during a discussion of -gif- words.
Lmao, idk why anyone would claim that either. Re: the other part, I also don’t think there’s any inherent reason the “f”, but in my sleepy haze writing this last night I wasn’t able to think of an example with the soft “g” followed by “if”. I feel like it must exist but I’m too tired to find it.
Looks like the only “normal”(ish) word that has the gif string is fungi, and even that has both hard/soft g listed as pronunciations. There are also apparently a few long words like spongiferous and some biologic classes (as opposed to (eg) species) ending in -formes that happen to end in -giformes (like Archaeopterygiformes). But I wouldn’t expect too many people to have those in their pocket during a discussion of -gif- words.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-containing-gif
https://word-finder.com/words-with/gif/