spelling pronunciation--words in -or

[Herb Stahlke]

We've all heard words ending in -or pronounced with stress on the
ultima and with the vowel /O/.  My sense of the distribution of this
is that it tends to come more from professional educators and
administrators than from others.  The stress sounds like the Nuclear
Stress Rule in action, where the -or suffix is treated as if it's the
head noun and the rest of the word the adjective.  I hadn't heard it
with -or/-our spellings until this evening when David Shuster,
guesting on Countdown, pronounced "candor" like a compound noun.  His
guest responded immediately to him and pronounced the word the same
way, with perhaps a little more stress on -or.  Has anyone worked on
the distribution of this pronunciation?  /k&ndOr may be different from
suffixal -or since it sounds more like the result of the Compound
Stress Rule, like "blackbird" as opposed to "black bird."

Herb

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