What can I say? I was born in a barn. With meeces who we hated to pieces. 
Jeesus!
I was watching a game show and the contestant pronounced “Tour” as Tor. The host pronounced it as Too-er. When I was young I had pronounced it as Tor, then noticed others were pronouncing as Too-er and changed.
I’m not sure how common the Tor pronunciation is, and if it’s considered wrong or not.
Guess who got Bar Mitzvah’ed
On the PGA Tour:
No, I’m not talking about Tiger Woods,
I’m talking about Mister Happy Gilmore!
It’s tor in tourmaline, but not in tourniquet
I’ve also heard “turr” rhymes with “burr” (or sir or her; English is … speshul)
In most dialects it is pronounced hou**z**es. That is irregular. The plural of class is not clazzes.
It’s not as bad as “woman/women”, where the spelling changes the second vowel, but the pronunciation changes the first vowel.
No argument there. I just discovered that all three of my children call that big green banana planTAYN, while I have always called it PLANT’n.
The original pronunciation was “offen” and it was spelled that way. For some reason, it picked up a “t” (I suspect that the second “f” was seen as a “t” when written by hand) and the pronunciation changed.
There are several examples of words that changed their pronunciation because of their spelling. The most obvious (and fairly recent) is “falcon.” The Bogart Maltese Falcon pronounces it as “faucon” with no “L” sound (same with the Gay Falcon, the first in a series of mystery programmers). Nowadays, the “L” is usually pronounced.
Comfortable was pronounced “conftable” (three syllables); the spelling added the extra syllable.
“Victuals” was pronounced “vittles.” Nowadays, you’re more likely to hear it as “vicktuals.”
I previously might pronounce the T when I was emphasizing the word. But I checked and I no longer do that.
For house, I seem to distinguish between the verb and the noun. The noun is haws and hawsɪz, but the verb is hawz and hawzɪz. Though I’m sure in quick speech I may not distinguish so clearly.
One thing I have noticed in my dialect is that I seem to have a special pronunciation for we’ll. I don’t pronounce it like a shorter “w(h)eel”, and I very often don’t pronounce it like “will,” either. The closest word would be “wool.” I seem to do this for any other combination of ee before L, even in quick speech.
That even includes “she’ll” and “he’ll”, which I pronounce like “shill” and “hill”, respectively. That w seems to push the vowel away from ɪ and towards ə (uh) or ʊ (as in book).
This is wrong. Often is derived from the more primitive word oft, where the t has always been pronounced.
My hunch is a lot of vowels shorten themselves naturally (will for wheel, etc.) - it’s just slightly less effort to say.
Consider the word “primary.” In the American South, the long “eye” diphthong commonly gets flattened into a plain “ah” without the ending “ee” part of the vowel. Whereas in the north and west, the same “eye” vowel is sometimes shortened to a short “i”. I hear this every time I call the doctor’s office: the recorded voice says very clearly, “Thank you for calling Western Primmery Care.” It makes me fill very prim.
I understand it as… (and I could be wrong)… Originally for fasten, hasten, often and soften the t was pronounced. Later, the T became silent in all four words. Later, people started pronouncing the T in often, but not for fasten, hasten and soften.
That’s right.
(Pacific NW-er). I pronounce ‘often’ in a manner to be conciliatory to both groups, where the ‘t’ is pronounced but with a soft brushing of the tongue to the palate. Sort of halfway between a ‘t’ and ‘th’.
The pronunciation had already been established by the time the first dictionaries were compiled.