For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don’t want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That’s ludicrous!
That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use “less” when they should use “fewer”
Gift is by far the most commonly used word that is comparable, and it is a very close comparison, it makes sense people would base it off that. I’m a soft g person myself, but the one letter change doesn’t hold up very well here. All your examples have an additional letter specifically to change how another letter is pronounced using well established rules. That is not the case here at all.
Pan/pang- the g has a well established rule to change the pronunciation of the a? No it doesn’t lol. Words are not comparable like that in english, this is another terrible argument.
Examples: lead and lead, read and read, tear and tear, bass and bass, wind and wind. Spelled the exact same way and different pronunciations. Trying to prove how gif is pronounced based on the word gift just proves you haven’t thought about this for more than 10 seconds.
There is no grammatical argument for hard g. There is also no grammatical argument for soft g. Once again, g followed by i or e can be either in English. The only thing that should sway this is what the creator intended and straight up told everybody many times.
I don’t pronounce those A sounds any differently, I didn’t realize that was your point. Maybe there’s a bit of a glide in pan, but both have æ sounds.