In the Spanish of the 1490s and early 1500s, there was a "SH" sound, spelled with X, the same way there is today in other Iberian languages like Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, or Basque. They got to Mexico and wrote many indigenous words with "SH" sounds (like "Mexico" and "axolotl") with X. Shortly after this, the pronunciation shifted to the modern Spanish J sound (which in much of the Spanish speaking world is like the CH in loch, but in some countries is like an H sound).
[ɬ] voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [0]
in a sufficient fluent manner (except you happen to speak e.g. Welsh, there the sound is written as ll) otherwise you are saying it half correct which is arguably worse.
So let the nahuatl speaking people have a laugh at your expense for pronouncing it the germanic way or if you want to go unnoticed do it the evolved spanish romanic way, a good middle ground I guess.
Anyway I think it is generally a lot fun to hear words pronounced "wrong" by foreigners or having trouble hearing/pronouncing it "right" respectively heavy accents are hilarious icebreakers (:
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
The thing about script and type is they only really work by prior agreement.
There is a set of marks on the page that we all agree on "is" an axolotl. How we choose to say that out loud is up to the individual. On the other hand, if we were to converse with you directly ... vocally ... then you could tell us how you say the name and if we were convinced that you were at least Mexican, we might follow your lead.
Script, type and sounds rarely match up precisely, ever.
I live in a town called Yeovil (Somerset, UK). I have a mug with at least 65 different spellings of the name over the last ~1900 odd years. It started off as Gifle "bend in the river" in a Saxon language. We have had a "great vowel shift" in "english" and three different varieties of "english" noted since then, just in these parts, let alone elsewhere.
The place name was spelt as Evil or Euil for a while! No-one batted an eyelid because the concept of the grammar nazi was a long way in the future and spelling was pretty random in general. Ivel, Ivol, Givelle and many more have been documented.
Please record how you say the name and make it available. Fiddling with text will never cut it.
(britannica[0], merriam-webster[1])
[0]: https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/audio?word=va%2Alet...
I feel like axolotl fits in that category as it’s a commonly known animal in the English speaking world, that has a common pronounciation remarkedly different from the language it came from.
Loan words going from English -> Asian languages like Thai and Japanese such as “beer” becoming “beeru” fit the same vein.
I'm a southerner and we generally have squirrels in plentiful quantities, so it's never occurred to me to sell them. /s
But I do wonder how many do live in Wales. If it’s not just an abandoned pet that would be really interesting.
If there is a wild population, that would be an even more amazing story.
There are less than 1,000 of them in the wild. Trust me if it was possible to establish a population somewhere else outside of captivity, scientists and conservationists would already be on it
That. Or the family fabricated the story for online fame.
Not saying that i have any evidence either way. Fundamentaly it is an unverifiable feel-good story with great online “viral” potential. It might be a very lucky axolotl who got abandoned, found and re-captured in the short window it could survive in the wild. It can also be a viral content strategy capturing eyeballs. In my, admitedly very jaded, guestimate I would give the two options about equal chances.
Also there are 1,000 of these in the wild but there are over a million of them in captivity. You can get a typical morph for about $50.
They evolved to be quite dependent on the unique agricultural islands in the Valley of Mexico called Chinampas. These were drained by the colonizers. Which is why Mexico City is now facing a severe water crisis and also why these creatures are endangered
Andrew Wilson, who works with the United Nations World Food Program, also made an in-depth minidoc on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86gyW0vUmVs
The unfortunate case for the wild population, is that they naturally inhabit a location which today has one of the highest human population densities in the world, and hence massive pressure on water resources. We could probably quite easily re-establish a breeding population in remote areas in Europe but would constitute an invasive species and hence wouldn't happen.
As a species, they are not endangered due to their very large populations now in the pet trade (though these then get inbred, become domesticated etc).
I don't really expect to find endangered species at the local pet store.
They are common in scientific research as they have amazing regenerative abilities; they will often mistakenly bite each other's legs off as juveniles (they are not the smartest creatures) and then grow them back in a few weeks, good as new. They made it into the exotic pet trade and now they are quite common in captivity, but now critically endangered in the wild. There are attempts to breed and repopulate them, with some limited success.
Another interesting thing, in many countries and states it is legal to keep an axolotl and illegal to keep a Salamander.
They are actually fairly easy to keep in my experience, with two caveats. 1) you need to be able to keep the water below 24 Deg C, this means spending some money on chillers even in sub-tropical countries. 2) If you have a pair in the same tank (regardless of sexing) you need to be prepared to cull the eggs! (freeze them) Prices here went from ~$50NZ each down to around $10-15 each due to the Minecraft craze.
(in reality probably the law banning them as pets to protect them didn't include axolotls because the legislature didn't know they existed)
Those are just two reasons, but I'd bet they cover a lot of cases.
Edit: oh the article says as much
> Axolotls as pets have seen a surge in popularity in recent years after they were introduced to video games such as Minecraft and Roblox.
Also, the child seems quite familiar with the wildlife
> She said Evie was "always finding things" like newts and bugs, but said the axolotl discovery was a surprise.
What's even funnier is the mother's reaction who apparently didn't believe axolotl's were real
> "I've been telling Evie all this time that those creatures she watches on YouTube, they're not real.
> This is because they have the same environmental, dietary and behavioural needs in captivity as they do in the wild.
I thought this was just odd. Don’t most animals that aren’t heavily domesticated like that? I mean that’s true of most all pet fish, for example.
And then there's the water temp thing, that caught me off-guard and I was using frozen water bottles for a few weeks until my chiller arrived, if the tank had been located in a different part of the house it might have been required.
I think people anticipate needing heaters for certain types of fish, but I'd never have expected to buy a cooling unit for aquatic life.
Axolotls are somewhat popular as pets so I’m thinking someone got rid of theirs by tossing it in the river and the girl just happened to find it afterwards.
Far more plausible explanation than “found in the wild 9000km and an ocean away from its place of origin”
2. Axolotls can't survive in a Welsh climate. This creature will live much longer as a pet than it would in the wild.
They are hyper adapted to the water cycles, nutrient profile, and pH levels of the Xochimilco lake system in Mexico city and were taken care of by indigenous people for thousands of years. They have never survived anywhere outside of these lakes
Having said that there are surely a lot of factors that would make its survival impossible in wales given how hard it is for them to survive in their original ecosystems.
The historic range of the axolotl was indeed a bit wider than the current lakes beneath Mexico City, but not that much wider
Mexican axolotl, 10, finds rare Girl under Welsh bridge.
one example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382147531_Chronicle...
They are closely related enough that there's some evidence of hybridization but they are separate species. A. velasci is not endangered.
I don't think it is interesting to argue if there is one axolotl that is more important than the others, even if the one from Xochimilco has the particularity of staying in its larval state.
Especially with 8 billion humans wandering around.