spelling pronunciation--words in -or

[Alison Murie]

On Mar 18, 2009, at 10:50 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      spelling pronunciation--words in -or
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>
> 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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~~~~~~~~~
Whenever I hear the National Association of Realtors identified as a
sponsor on the radio it seems to be pronounced  "real'tors" , as in
or, or ore, or oar!  For some reason, this always strikes me as more
than just spelling-awareness; it's as if the -or ending conferred some
sort of classiness on the business.
AM

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