I have finally chosen names for the snakes. As I was handling them I noticed that one snake (#28) had a dot over her left eye. The other snake (#40) had dots over both eyes. You can see a picture of their heads at the bottom of this post. Since they are my first and second pet snakes ever, I decided to do some sort of play on the numbers one and two.
Emoryi are native to the western U.S. and so I thought about using something American Indian. I went so far as to look up the Apache words, but they are too hard to pronounce (da£aa and naki). The slash “L” (represented by the pound currency sign, since the true character is not renderable in HTML) is almost silent and lispy (-thl). It would have sounded something like /dah’ thl-a ah/. The number two was less awkward sounding (/nah kee’/).
Enter the help of my pastor and his Japanese wife.
Japanese have different counters depending on what you are counting. For example, for flat things such as paper we use the suffix ~mai: so, ichi-mai, ni-mai, san-mai, etc. For long thin items such as pencils, ~hon. So, Ippon, Ni-hon, san-bon, etc. For small animals, including snakes, ~pikki. So, Ippikki, ni-hikki, san-bikki, etc.
All that to say, why not name them Ippikki and Nihikki (pronounced “Ee’peekee” and “Nee-heekee”)
Or, my wife suggests, Itten and Niten (this counter focuses on the dot, not the animal; pronounced “Ee’ten” and “Neeten”)
Another option from her: Ichiro and Jiro (common names with the numbers 1 and 2 in the names; pronounced “Eechee-roe” (like the baseball player) and “Jee-roe”) (She votes for this third option.)
After clarifying that the snakes are female, we have settled on Kazumi (”# 1 Beautiful”; pronounced “Kah - soo - mee” “kah-zoo-me”) and Sugiko Tsugiko (”#2 Child”; pronounced “Tsu-gee-ko”). Maybe I should have let the kids name the snakes, but the last time we did that the fish ended up being called Nemo and Daddy.
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Yeah, we currently have two sets fish named Nemo and Goldy. Sam is our most creative pet namer. He had a cockatiel he named Birthday, and he named his goldfish Sausage and Bacon. Though Bacon has since gone to the big tank in the sky. I appreciated Joseph’s thought process on naming his bearded dragon Harry (”get it, Mom? beard. . hair. . .Harry”), and though I liked the name Peyton for Ethan’s dragon, naming it after a football player was less than highly creative.
I like Kazumi and Sugiko, though I probably would have voted for Naki and “Dathlaa” since my experiences with Mixteco have made it a little easier to pronounce the strange combinations of t and l that Native American languages frequently use. . . for some reason all the gs and ks in Japanese feel awkward to me.
It’s funny though. . .we went through a similar process when naming Noah. I looked up the number five in every language we could find. In the end we decided it wouldn’t be fair to name him something my mother would never be able to say. So instead we went with a name that means “rest”. As in, “that’s the rest of ‘em, we’re ready to rest.”
But the most clever pet name in your household is Monty the Python!
Yes, but the credit for that one goes to my cousin, Bill Turner, from whom we inherited Monty.
I should mention then, that clever is my code word for “I am really being a little bit facetious.” Consider creative a genuine compliment.
I was browsing a bunch of snake rescue websites recently and there are a fair number of ball pythons available. Of those that had names, guess what half of them were?
We always dot our “eyes”! Is that a common marking for this type of snake?
Sorry Scott… IT’s Tsugiko, not Sugiko. Little mistake on this end.
…and Ka-Zu-Mi, not ka-su-mi. I hope it would not mess up the whole thing…
No problem…so the spelling was wrong on Tsugiko, but the pronounciation is correct (Sue - Gee - Koh)? The spelling on Kazumi is correct, but the pronounciation is with a Z instead of an S?
Tsugiko (Tsu-gee-ko) and Kazumi (kah-zoo-me). I don’t know how to describe TSU sound…