spelling pronunciation--words in -or

[Herb Stahlke]

That accounts for "realtor" but not for "educa'tor" or
"administra'tor", where the primary stress is on -tor.

Herb

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 8:17 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: spelling pronunciation--words in -or
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>
> At 6:42 PM -0400 3/19/09, Alison Murie wrote:
>>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
>>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>>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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