Iain replied to M J's post: > > Vlad, because darn it if someone can mistake "Khaavren" for > > "Khaav'n", then Vlad can hear "Kathana e'Marish'Chala" and spell it > > "Katana e'Mar'Chala" -- [snip] > A likely possibility is that some accents drop the 'sh' and 'th' (and > substitute 't') constructions (although I don't recall any evidence of > this elsewhere), leading to the different spelling. :) Or perhaps the culprit is the r that appears in both names. I can hear in my minds ear an accent in which the vowel following the r gets swallowed up in the quietly rolled r to Vlad and he can't distinguish between shch and ch when this happens (think the difference between the consonant in the middle of misshapen and the one in the middle of mission). Meanwhile, the vowel proceeding the r in Katana's surname is sufficiently altered that Vlad can deduce that it was there. Also, I have not seen any 'rule' described about the use of the apostrophe in Dragaeran names. the e' patronymic prefix aside, what names other than the aforementioned have we seen with one? If in these cases it is simply short hand for "I know there are more letters in here somewhere, but I don't know what they should be and rather than offending someone by misspelling their name, I'm going to admit it up front and hope you can tell who I'm talking about". For that matter, there is no evidence that in fact it is _Vlad_ who misspelled those names, is there? I mean, even though most of the stories are told in first person, does Vlad-as-narrator ever refer to _writing_ down the account that we are reading? There is of course one book that explicitly depicts Vlad giving the story orally, so perhaps the error (if there is one) belongs to an ignorant transcriptionist. > I am, of course, making all of this up. :) As am I. :) Casey