Jack Daniel
Legend
I've been mulling over the OP's question, and I think it's just that the "proper" pronunciation of "centaur" — something approximating the Latinized Greek word centaurus, after having gone through the antiquity-to-medieval-to-modern wringer (i.e. ken- > chen- > tsen > sen-TAU-roos) — as "sen-towr", with that diphthong now in an unstressed syllable and flanked by consonants like it is, is just super awkward in English.
And so most people are going to collapse that aʊ sound into either an unrounded "a" or a rounded "o" — and that's how you get "SEN-tar" and "SEN-tore". With the stress on the first syllable, there's some acceptable variation in how that last vowel gets pronounced (or glossed over and mumbled, as the case may be). And since the word isn't frequently in common use, there's no standard.
Backing this hypothesis up, I hear both "MIN-ə-tar" and "MIN-ə-tore" with about the same frequency. But dinosaur, which is a much more commonly used word, is always "DINE-ə-sore," never "DINE-ə-sar" (at least in the Great Plains and Midwestern dialects of American English that I'm routinely exposed to).
Then again, maybe there's just something about that diphthong, because nobody I know pronounces "taurus" (either the constellation or the vehicle) as "TAU-russ." It's either "TAR-us" or "TOR-us" — usually the latter, such that "taurus" and "torus" are basically homonyms in American English. ("Me? I drive a Ford Torus. Yeah, the cabin volume is 2π²r²R, what of it?")
And so most people are going to collapse that aʊ sound into either an unrounded "a" or a rounded "o" — and that's how you get "SEN-tar" and "SEN-tore". With the stress on the first syllable, there's some acceptable variation in how that last vowel gets pronounced (or glossed over and mumbled, as the case may be). And since the word isn't frequently in common use, there's no standard.
Backing this hypothesis up, I hear both "MIN-ə-tar" and "MIN-ə-tore" with about the same frequency. But dinosaur, which is a much more commonly used word, is always "DINE-ə-sore," never "DINE-ə-sar" (at least in the Great Plains and Midwestern dialects of American English that I'm routinely exposed to).
Then again, maybe there's just something about that diphthong, because nobody I know pronounces "taurus" (either the constellation or the vehicle) as "TAU-russ." It's either "TAR-us" or "TOR-us" — usually the latter, such that "taurus" and "torus" are basically homonyms in American English. ("Me? I drive a Ford Torus. Yeah, the cabin volume is 2π²r²R, what of it?")
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