How do you pronounce Aeschaven?

Fallen London
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It still confuses me after years of playing so I finally wanna ask: how do you pronounce Aeschaven? The possibilities I see are:

  • Ash-aven (/æʃavən/)
  • Ask-haven (/æskhavən/)
  • Esh-aven (/ɛʃavən/)
  • Esk-haven (/ɛskhavən/)

Also, where do you put the accent in the word? Is it AESCH-aven (emphasis on the first syllable), or aesch-A-ven (emphasis on the second syllable)?
Also, does anybody know a possible origin/etymology for the name? It sounds familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

Edit: not to forget the possibility that the “haven” part is pronounced /heivən/; English is not my first language.

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Äsch (German spelling of Aesch) is a word in Limburgish derived from Middle Dutch, which in turn derives from Proto-Germanic and ultimately Proto-Indo-Germanic.

It also occurs in Luxembourgish, which is part of the German dialect grouping. There, it derives from Middle and Old High German.

It means ash.

Yes, I’d suppose the haven bit is pronounced the English way, as a diphthong – the meaning would be safe place or (safe) harbour

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Almost all the places in Sunless Sea are named after backers, and there used to be a player who went by the handle “aesc”. So “Aesc-haven”, though that does not explain the pronunciation of the “sc”. I’ve always alternated between “Ash-haven” and “Ask-haven” in my mind.

Maybe aesc is still around and can tell us?

Edit: According to wiktionary, æsc is also the Old English spelling of ash, and was pronounced just the same. So “Ash-haven” is probably correct.

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That’s interesting! What other examples do we have of places in SS named after a backer?

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According to the Kickstarter, 126 backers kicked in enough money to have a geographical feature in the game named after/by them.

Perusing a picture of the paper map of the game shows a couple places that stick out, such as a shipwreck named ‘Wreck of the Mikko’ and a rock named ‘Lipiäinen Point’. Mikko is a Finnish masculine name and Lipiäinen is a Finnish family name. A British-based studio comprised mostly of English-speaking developers could of course possibly have thrown in those names themselves, but my bet is on those being named after Kickstarter backers.

I don’t currently have the game installed so can’t check if there are more obvious ones.

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Tanah-Chook is probably the most prominent one. Port Erdönmez.
And then many geographical locations like Rainer’s Vortex or Lipiäinen Point as already mentioned.
Basically everything non-English is probably a backer’s name.

And I just found an old thread from these very forums where people expressed their delight when first finding their named locations! aesc is among them and basically confirms the “ash” pronunciation in their post.

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Thanks for the link! That indeed looks like some pretty good evidence to me. Ash-haven (/æʃheivən/) it is then! Hurray!

Having such a location named after you is so damn rad tho

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For some reason this gave me a notification on my email, even though I have not used these forums for nearly a decade now. Anyhow hi, I’m the person who named Lipiäinen Point, always nice to see it occasionally get brought up (I know there was a thread on the steam forums that also was asking about it recently!).

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