Forum:Typos and spelling differences TV vs books

We need to discuss what to do when there are spelling differences between the books, TV series, and/or supplementary TV materials. I.e. Samyrian vs Shamyriana, Bhorash vs Bhonash. We can usually tell when something is a simple typo if its a commonly used name; i.e. if "Cersei" was spelled "Sersei" exactly once in the TV series or a supplementary material (the HBO viewer's guide), we'd disregard that as a typo. If a common, major character from the books is frequently and consistently spelled an alternate way in the TV series, that should probably be taken as that the name truly is different in the TV continuity, i.e. if they were to consistently spell it as "Edmeer Tully" instead of "Edmure" Tully. The problem is with obscure names that only get mentioned once or twice. In general, I think that we should count things that appear on-screen far more than supplementary materials like the HBO viewers' guide, because we don't know how much oversight those things have - certainly less than the show. Some of these things like Bhonash or Samyrian were mentioned exactly once in the initial print run of the books -- maybe the original books had a typo, and George R.R. Martin has corrected this for the TV series: J.R.R. Tolkien ran into this kind of problem all the time, with typos in the proper nouns of his initial print run of Lord of the Rings (the original mispelled it as "Kirith Ungol", even though its spelled with a (hard) C as "Cirith Ungol", and this had to be fixed). However, I'm more inclined to think that -- particularly with the HBO viewer's guide -- we should take the books over the HBO viewers' guide and assume these are just typos until proven otherwise.

The categorization scheme I'm suggesting is:

1 - A name that frequently appears in the books ("Catelyn", "Aegon", etc.) is misspelled the one time it appears in the TV series, on-screen: we may have a discussion about it, but should generally lean towards the books.

2 - However, if it appears multiple times in the TV series consistently using the new spelling, we should probably conclude that the official TV series continuity spelling is indeed alternate.

3 - A name that frequently appears in the books is misspelled exactly once in supplementary materials like the HBO viewer's guide, etc. We should assume this is a simple typo, not that the name is different in the TV continuity.

4 - A name that appears very infrequently in the books is given a new spelling in the TV show; it may have appeared only once or twice in the books so we're not really sure if it the original may itself have been a typo (like "Kirith Ungol"). We will have to have a discussion about whether to accept the new name or not.

5 - A name that appears very infrequently, only once or twice, in the books appears only once in supplementary materials like the HBO viewers' guide: i.e. Samyrian vs Shamyrian. We should assume this is a typo.

-->If nothing else, we should compile a list of these alternate spellings so at some point in the future, we can pass them along to a major fansite like Westeros.org who can in turn pass it along to HBO or George R.R. Martin (I'm talking on a scale of years) to ask to confirm the proper spellings. --The Dragon Demands 19:56, April 19, 2012 (UTC)