Yeah you see you've omitted most of my argument because it'd be absurd to argue against. Including the part which I bolded specifically – the part about e.g. Oxford or Merriam-Webster completely disagreeing with you.

I already mentioned, there are plenty of words with "gi" that say it /dʒ/, including things that end in "-giform" (e.g. "spongiform", "fungiform") which has "gif" in it. That on its own disproves your point. You'd have to do some real mental gymnastics to justify it, like "gift is shorter" or "only words that start with gif count", which is just grasping as straws making arbitrary lines. At that point I could just say "only 3 letter words count" or "gift doesn't count because the syllable isn't /gɪf/ but /gɪft/ with a consonant cluster, therefore it's invalid, only things where "gif" represent a standalone syllable count" or something else. Oh and by the way, some dialects like West Country pronounce gift like it were spelled "yift", because using a yod is the "original" pronunciation. Since your criteria seems to be if dialects pronounce it that way, that means I can go ahead and pronounce it like "yiff" and be correct in your eyes, no? Or, maybe, maybe, the "correct" pronunciation of a word is THE MANY WAYS WHICH GROUPS CAN BE OBSERVED PRONOUNCING IT rather than some arbitrary prescriptive "correct" way based on stupid and inconsistent arbitrarily made rules, and the idea of one being correct is completely subjectively defined and made up.

Also no, that's not "how spelling works", if it were then words like "gimbal" wouldn't have 2 or more pronunciations (/dʒ/ vs /ɡ/ like in "ɡif"). Spelling is not tied to how language is pronounced, in English it's roughly tied to how a few random Middle English to Early Modern English dialects spelled and pronounced it, which is extremely detached from how it's pronounced today – most words used to have over a dozen spellings based on the writer and we created standards based off of multiple arbitrarily picked writing styles. You can pick out a few inconsistencies, but as I said the irregularities vastly outweigh the regularities. This is especially apparent when you look at words that contain strings like "gh", "gi/ge/gy/ci/ce", "oo", actually anything at all with a vowel really.

And who are you to determine what a "slight" difference is? It's all subjective. Someone with a thick welsh accent, or a rural southern Irish dialect, or who speaks Scottish English, or who has a thick north Indian accent, will have a hard time being understood by the average person who speaks e.g. an accent from the west coast US or Chicago. You can find many clips online where English MPs/politicians have a considerably hard time understanding Scottish people because of the linguistic differences.

By your logic, British people pronounce "schedule" wrong because they generally pronounce it starting with /ʃ/ (although both pronunciations are found and used), while Americans pronounce it with /sk/. I mean, who do they think they are, would you say "school" like that? Or "schematic"??? Or "schizophrenia"! They sound like those dirty Germans, pronouncing it differently than me... and other words that contain "sch" but are pronounced differently don't count because... reasons? They're way less common maybe? That's how you sound right now.

In the same vain, most west Slovak speakers can understand Czech with little difficulty and vice versa. Actually Slovak speakers can interact with most slavic speakers to a good degree. By your logic, Slovak is correct Czech or Ukrainian, but Scottish English isn't correct English. Hmmm...

You are silly for thinking that your pronunciation is "the correct" pronunciation. Your pronunciation is just as absurd as any other. Also people pronounce it with /dʒ/ because it just makes sense, and it generally is more common in certain areas of the country, you're acting like /gɪf/ is the pronunciation people first think when they see the word.

Also let's use your logic on other acronyms. NASA – well clearly /næ.sə/ is wronɡ, look at the other common word containing that sequence like "nasal"! Or how about LASER – well words like "eraser" and "chaser" disagree! Or yolo – "myology" and "embryology". OSHA – "turboshaft" and "goshawk". NATO– "senator", "anatomy", "urinatory", "natoma". How is GIF somehow the exception to not being consistent with pronunciation of words containing the same sequence of letters? Which by the way, as I pointed out with e.g. "spongiform", it is, but even if you want to ignore that.

I don't even care about you addressing the rest of my previous comment, I just want you to tell me, do you really think you know better than the dictionary folks? The people who's job is basically deciding what is ""correct"" language? The prescriptive linguistic institutions?