spelling pronunciation--words in -or

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:42 PM -0400 3/19/09, Alison Murie wrote:
>On Mar 18, 2009, at 10:50 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>
>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
>>Subject:      spelling pronunciation--words in -or
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>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
>

Well, maybe; I've certainly noticed that as well (as in the radio
commercial that proclaims to one and all that "only real-tors are
members of the National Association of Real-tors").  But then it
reminds me of the final secondary stress and lack of vowel
neutralization in lawyers' references to the "defend-ant".

LH

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