japan is also kinda fucking itself over twice:
- they don’t have enough young workers and treat them like shit, which is directly causing the pushback you describe
- they are so xenophobic that they can’t just hire foreign labor either
so, yeah, double fucked!
all of the words you listed that use a soft g are loanwords from other languages (pretty sure they’re all french) soooo…yeah. no wonder those have different pronunciation.
when you look at anglo-saxon words the difference becomes clear:
all hard g’s.
mixing up languages is the common denominator here.
the G in GIF stands for graphical, neither english nor french in origin, hence the confusion about pronunciation.
alternatively; English is a terrible mess, and the only “correct” pronunciation is reached through general consensus. if the majority pronounces something a certain way, that’s how it should be pronounced.