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.
Re:The Afsluitdijk
by vanderZwan on Saturday December 21, 2019 @11:02AM
(#21851774)
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.
FWIW, the German translation would be "Abschlussdeich".
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)
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).