The Names of Sauron

[Mnemosyne]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

So maybe The Mouth and the other emissary actually used Sairon, and Frodo's witnesses (remember he, the presumed author of the Red Book, wasn't present at either of the occasions) misheard it as Sauron, the name they were familiar with? They could easily have taken the slight difference for dialectal pronunciation...

I was just going to suggest something with translation. The PoV character for this chapter was Pippin, who had no reason to think that Sauron had any other name. Probably Gandalf and/or Aragorn, who were much more learned, would have been able to tell the linguistic difference--and possibly Frodo himself, if his skill at pronunciation extended to being able to tease apart other people's vowels--but Pippin at least would have reported it as "Sauron."

Granted, the section where this happens is told pretty objectively (I don't think we get anyone's thoughts), so maybe I just undermined this whole argument.

And I get the feeling that we're just back-justifying genuine plotholes using the Translator's Conceit yet again... (We run into a similar problem with the fact that "Moria" which wasn't called "Moria" until post-Balrog still has "Moria" engraved on its doors.)