With or without R

[Black Cat]

I know that in the online edition of the books, the city of Anskaven is spelled without an R. However, I saw other places where the name is spelled Anskavern, with an R.

In this month's issue of Signs & Portents, Darren Pearce, aka Grey Wolf, wrote a description of the city of Anskavern (with the R) and said that he did ask Joe Dever about the name. Apparently, Joe meant the city to be named Anskavern.

What will Project Aon do with this issue? Stay with Anskaven, or change to Anskavern?

[outspaced]

Gah! I wish we'd known about this a couple of years ago. :-\

After discussion, we've decided we'll go with the authoritative spelling from Joe (i.e. Anskavern), which means we'll also need to update the map images for several of the books. Thanks for pointing this out, BC--best to get these sorts of things on the radar ASAP.

I should also point out that I've just uploaded a fixed version of The Magnamund Companion that now consistently uses Anskavern.

[Taryn]

What is it with "rn" that confuses people so much? LOL

I think the Mountains of Morn in one of the GS books came out "Mountains of Mom" on PA somewhere, although that could have been an OCR mishap. A while back I was reading some (non-LW) books aloud to an audience, and a character's name changed from "Tarn" to "Tam" out of nowhere. Like, consistently "Tarn" until a certain point, then consistently "Tam". I ended up maintaining the original name when reading.

In that case, I'm surprised Anskavern didn't become Anskavem.

Of course, I used to drop R's from words a lot in German, because the r's tend to almost drop from the pronunciation similar to in many English accents in England. Like writing "studiest" for "studierst". In my native English dialect, the R's are pronounced harshly, so "burn" sounds absolutely nothing like "bun", but in some Englishes they're closer in pronunciation. Maybe whoever did the maps spoke a different dialect and didn't hear the r?

[pi4t]

I saw some word on PA which was obviously meant to be an 'rn' word, but ended in m

[Thomas Wolmer]

Those are typical OCR errors yes. And if it happens to form a real word, the automatic spellchecking won't catch it either.

[Black Cat]

Glad to be of help!

[viktor]

Hello, fellow Kais!

I know 10 years have passed, but this question still bothered me, so I contacted the official Lone Wolf facebook page (www.facebook.com/magnamund).

The reply I got is that the correct name is Anskaven (without the "R"):

Hi Viktor, the official name is "Anskaven" in all Lone Wolf medias. The name "Anskavern" was in fact used in the first version of LW3 "The Caverns of Kalte", but it contradicted the map of this book and was later rejected in favour of "Anskaven" in all other books (LW19, Magnamund Companion) and in the reprint of LW3 by Joe Dever himself.

I hope nobody will mind that I posted this reply here and that it's contradicting AON's naming convention.
I just want to find out the truth.