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Comment by gherkinnn | Hacker News Reader

It looks like I rolled my face over a keyboard.

None of the potential substrings make any sense to me, so it’s one long jumble.

Hehe okay. Not sure it's mentioned anywhere: it consists of two words (similar to English compound words like "sundial"): afsluit and dijk, where dijk pronounced similar to dike and means the same. Afsluit is less close to English and means "enclosure". The enclosure dike.

Wikipedia says "enclosure dam", which is more accurate since a dam has water on two sides, as the afsluit-dijk does, but that's not what we call it in Dutch. Then it would have been afsluitdam -- yes, dam and dam are the same in Dutch and English, just like dike and dijk are very similar. Wonder why! :-)

Edit: not sure why you're being downvoted?! I always find it rude when people downvote without comment (also on stackoverflow, I typically comment when I see it on my own or someone else's posts).

As a native English speaker with Dutch colleagues, I've always thought Dutch was remarkably close. Once you kinda figure out pronunciation patterns a lot of it is very similar. Written Dutch is the only language I intuitively perceive the cognate rrelationships with.

Supposedly we are the second-closest language to English linguistically (I'm not sure by what measure - I'm not a linguist). Only Frisian, which has many similarities to Old English, is closer.

Ah. That’s where the name Dijkstra comes from, ey?

I don't know what the -sta suffix means, aside from that it's a last name suffix (Hoekstra comes to mind, a last name which could be translated as corner-stra or angle-stra). It's not very common though and I can't think of any other -stra names. My first thought is that someone named Dijkstra historically constructed dikes, but then Hoekstra constructed... corners or angles?! Unless hoek had a different meaning in the middle ages, that can't be it.

Edit: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra (English page does not contain the important part)

Apparently -stra comes from some germanic word meaning "owner". I suppose Hoekstra owned the corner house and Dijkstra the dike.

> The suffix "-stra" is, like "-ster", derived from the old Germanic "-sater", to be translated as a seater or resident.

-- https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra (through Google translate)

FWIW, the German translation would be "Abschlussdeich".

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