As a frequent listener of Omnibus, I took it that Ken adopted that pronunciation either in solidarity with or as light mocking of a John Roderick, his co-host. John has a lot of weird affectations in his speech, including a very exaggerated ‘FRAWWWNNN-tier’, and of course referring to the predecessor to the current Russian state as the ‘Solviet Union’.
I think Ken is just playing along.
“Space: the final frawnteer.” Or “frahnteer” if you like, but he’s for sure not saying “frun-teer.” This was a joke in my family, who did say “frun-teer” and mocked Kirk’s weird pronunciation.
I’ve lived in a lot of places, and I don’t recall noticing “frun-tier” (I must have heard it, but didn’t notice).
Always something between “frahn” and “frawn.”
Or, you could pronounce it like Peter Gabriel: “She’s so frumpier” 
Note that Kirk Shatner grew up in Canada.
Why does Cap’n Kirk have three ears?
Well, he has a left ear,
and a right ear,
and a final front ear.
British schoolkids’ joke.
Maybe this is the issue. I have, of course, heard the opening of Star Trek many times (going all the way back to its original broadcasts). But until you just pointed it out, I had never noticed Shatner’s pronunciation of frontier.
But I found a video of Kenneth Vickery, the speaker I’m asking about. The topic of this lecture is South Africa’s development of its frontier so the word gets used a lot. Check out 1:30, 2:15, 2:25, 2:50, 3:30, etc.
Yes, this is how it’s pronounced.
Note there are probably over a biliion people in the world who speak English, but only the 30 million here in Canada speak it good.
I don’t know. I was visiting Montreal and the Canadians there were speaking English so poorly it sounded like an entirely different language.
It’s difficult to ‘stick the landing’ in these kinds of discussions without using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Often, even listening samples aren’t enough to achieve understanding because a person’s dialect affects both pronunciation and perception.
This won’t help everyone, but:
The issue I have with using IPA is that I find people who have certain mergers (e.g they say don and dawn the same) will often still use the wrong IPA, as they don’t really hear the difference in the two sounds. That’s why they use “aw” instead of “ah”, so why not /ɔ/ instead of /ɑ/. Heck, I’m still not sure what the difference is between /ɑ/ and /ɒ/.
Yeah, there’s 38 million people in Canada. You just found the other 8 million. (Plus, there’s Newfoundland.)
To me, “aw” is more like “ah-uh” or “ah-wuh”. Deputy Dawg’s last name does not sound exactly like “dog” as in “not” or “God”.
Yep, never any different from that for me, either.
I googled the official authority - Disney - and the Davy Crockett song seems to be more “oh” than “uh”. However, the board here won’t let me embed Youtube links.
This one?
To me, it sounds like an “uh.”
In the latter vowel, the lips are rounded – that’s the only difference.
For me, even with phonetics training, /ɒ/ and /ɔ/ are close to one another perceptually. Some Americans (including your truly) use a vowel approaching /ɒ/ for the vowel in thought, bought (and also dog, frog, talk, walk, etc.). Using or hearing /ɔ/ in these same words recalls for me a non-specific ‘British’ accent.
To me it sounds like a cross with the “ah” version of “oh”. At :20 and :39 - certainly not “uh” like “front” or “punt”.
The original Star Trek credits are also available on Youtube.
That one sounds close to “aw” for me, rather than “uh”. I don’t hear anything but an “uh” in the Davy Crockett theme, but the fact that it is sung may be obfuscating it for me.
Careful using the spelling “aw” to evoke a specific vowel sound to other English speakers – you need to also indicate whether or not “Don” and “Dawn” are perfect rhymes in your dialect.