Posted by Elizabeth Jolley on September 06, 2011 at 12:32:09 user Elizabeth.
In Reply to: Re: Pronunciation posted by John Lambert on August 31, 2011 at 17:09:51:
John--I'm not Ed, but I can hazard a guess about the long "A" that has turned into a short "O". I think Americans began to place a larger value on foreign, especially western European, accents around the 1970's or so. There were a lot of younger folk turning away from their parents' "America the Beautiful" beliefs, and looking out to other countries worldwide for ways of living differently. That was when I began to hear more people applying French, Spanish or Italian rules to words that we use here in the US. In some cases, that was the correct pronunciation of the word in its own language; in other cases it was an incorrect generalization.
The missing "T" is laziness, in my opinion. Very few people here sound their consonants with care.