People do not have to be taught the meaning of the agent 'er' suffix;
children master this on their own, and probably relatively early. It's a
frequent affix and children hear it on high-frequency words such as
'teacher', 'can opener', etc.

What is going on with 'manufacturer'  is that the final two syllables
are identical, and in rapid speech, probably are pronounced most of the
time as a single, extra-long 'er' syllable. Unless one notices the extra
length, it can be understood as the same as 'manufacture'. I think this
is a case of spelling what one hears, and we sure are seeing a lot of
that these days (and probably always have).

I don't find this misspelling any more sensible than the tendency for
younger people to leave off the suffixes of 'prejudiced' and 'biased' in
their writing, as in 'he made a prejudice remark' or 'to hire only
whites is very bias', which also have their source in pronunciation--the
final 't' of the suffix gets lost, especially if a word beginning with a
consonant follows.

My own belief is that these errors would be less common if people read
more. Insisting on clarity of pronunciation is unrealistic, as the
natural speed of speech makes such shortcuts inevitable. Such speech is
not 'sloppy', but normal, given the speed of natural language
production. If we all enunciated every sound clearly and fully, our
listeners would not only lose patience but think us insufferably
snobbish. And we would take a lot longer to talk to each other.

Johanna Rubba

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