In Canada, we have the latter, and having read both the American and Canadian versions, there are several minor word changes such as

"shan't" and "won't". I'm no grammar teacher (yet!) but it's just minor dialect changes... nothing earth-shattering.

Fred and George rule!

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Originally posted by Alwin:
because of the reasons mentioned above.

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All these religious freaks (not all religious people are freaks of course, but the ones who take part in this "Potter is satanism/cultish for children" thing are nothing less than, well, a freak) are getting WAY out of hand, and they should be thrown in a firey pit.

Of course, I don't really mean that...

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Originally posted by Marian Schedenig:
The Master of the Necklaces: The Companions of the Necklace...

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ROFL!

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The movie will probably be a real hit in the prisons over there though, that's a whole 3 hrs not slouched over a Singer pumping out Levi's.

Np: Harry Potter and the Sorcer...er Philo er SCREW IT!!!

There's probably no country -- with the possible exception of Pol Pot's Cambodia -- where exists such an institutionalized distrust of, and antagonism toward, intellectuals and intellectualism, as in the U.S.

As such, it's hardly surprising that the word "philosopher" would send up little red flags in the minds of publishers and film studios. Moreover, "sorcerer" conjures up (pun intended) images of pointy-hatted wizards a la Camelot's Merlin, or Mickey Mouse in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of FANTASIA, while "philosopher" results in images of folks sitting around thinking (hardly an active, energetic pursuit around which you want to build a marketing campaign. As Merlin warned the young king in the musical "Camelot": "Arthur! It's too late for you to be out thinking!").

Frankly, the alliterative nature of the phrase "Sorcerer's Stone" rolls more easily off the tongue than the British original, and is an improvement.

What's actually more troubling, however, are the changes in the books' text. When you start changing "shan't"s into "won't"s, you start to rob the language of its essential Britishness, and it starts to sink into an unfortunate sort of prosaic American mid-Atlanticism.

J.K. Rowling wrote her books for a British readership; the American market to her is just gravy (an almost incomparably rich gravy, to be sure).

"The philosopher's stone is an ancient legendary alchemic stone turning common metals into gold."

I'm not a fantasy or SF reader, so his explanation made sense to me. I do know that the reasons I gave were definitely discussed in the media somewhere. I believe I read it in Maclean's - the Canadian equivalent or Time, or Newsweek.

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Originally posted by perfpitch:
What's actually more troubling, however, are the changes in the books' text. When you start changing "shan't"s into "won't"s

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Bloody Americans!

Kirk, one of such