Good day all
For several decades our neighbour in Vancouver, who was born in Germany had a series of dogs. All the same breed. All of them named the same. Our running joke went from Jr. to the III to IV etc. The dogs’ names were all Loomby (spelling uncertain). The gent has long passed and I cannot find any translation online including spelling variants. Just curious what if anything this meant. Any takers? Closest I can find is a town in our province called Lumby (short “u”) so different pronunciation. I doubt that is the correct answer. Is it a German nickname perhaps ?
Thanks
CSM
How sure are you that it actually means something? Or that they were named in German? Maybe they were all named “Lamby”.
“Lumpi” (diminuitive of “Lump”, rascal) is or was a fairly common name for dogs in Germany.
ETA: The German pronunciation of that would be close to what you describe, “loom-pee”.
The closest thing I can think of is “Lumpi”, a stereotypical dogs name that might derive from “Lump”: https://www.animals-digital.de/tiere/tiername/Name/lumpi
As an aside, do you happen to know where he was from? Softening the “p”, as he seems to have done, makes me suspect he might have been from northern Bavaria.
Another vote for “Lumpi”. It is, or at least used to be, quite a common name for dogs, to the point of being a cliché. It’s a diminutive of “Lump”, which is a word - often a cute and endearing one - for a mischievous person.
Thanks for the replies. Mystery maybe solved. I can’t recall where exactly the gent was from. I do recall that despite having been in Canada for decades he sounded like a new arrival so any local inflection/ pronounciation from German origin was carried on. And each of the dogs was a “scoundrel”. I remember one would carry a large rock from the garden and drop it from the deck onto the Cadillac parked below. The gent never did change where he parked despite the multiple occurrences.