The Den in Den Haag seems to mean fur or pine.
Where did you get that from? Like I said it’s a definite article. The oldest form is ‘die Haghe’.

hoek is angle. accapareren, opkopen is corner.
Not sure what you are trying to say there, but it was already established that ‘hoek’ in ‘Hoek van Holland’ means corner.

Edinburgh/Dunedin
--
That is a new one to me

OP Tipping - 06 February 2011 02:24 PM

Edinburgh/Dunedin
--
That is a new one to me

Dunedin is the name of a city in New Zealand named after Edinburgh by Gaelicising it. The standard Gaelic form used today for the city of Edinburgh in Scotland is Dùn Èideann (Gaelic Wikipedia link).

As I understand it (I’m not a Gaelic speaker) there are standard Gaelic names for all settlements in Scotland and standard approach to creating Gaelic equivalents of English street names in places where bilingual signage is being introduced.

The vast majority of Gaelic versions of English language place names are simple transliterations, so Glasgow becomes Glaschu. Elements such as North and South are translated, so my home town of North Berwick becomes Bearaig a Tuath. Some other elements are translated by appealing to etymology such as -burgh being rendered as Dun (= castle) or Baile (= town). Personal names appearing in place names are usually translated using commonly accepted equivalences between English and Gaelic names, so Helensburgh becomes Baile Eilidh, Eilidh being the equivalent of Helen. Some place names are completely different in the two languages, so you just have to know that An Gearasdan is Fort William (the Gaelic means “the garrison").

Some Gaelicisations of English names produce slightly comical results. Ladysmith Street in Ullapool is probably named to commemorate the Relief of Ladysmith in the Boer War, however, its official Gaelic translation is Sraid Bean a’Ghobhainn - “Street of the Blacksmith’s Wife”.

Major screw up, DToo. I thought you were saying Den was not an article in Dutch so I used a Dutch-English dictionary to look it and other words up (Den means fir or pine it said and Haag is hedge which sounded like a place-name origin to me :( ) and arrive at the misguided conclusions above.
To clarify - hoek means angle and corner (90 degrees?) and not hook. Or Hoek van Holland is like an enclave or area (corner) within a town? I am sure I have heard it used in English such as Coles Corner, the name given to the corner of Fargate and Church Street in Sheffield (and a Richard Hawley song).

3. the place where two streets meet (AHD)

The corner of a room is accapareren or opkopen?

I will stick to English in future but I await your answer with interest.

(Fur! I meant fir in the earlier post.)

(Fur! I meant fir in the earlier post.)

Story remembered from my student days in Liverpool:

Young wacker* walks into fashionable fur shop, and addresses gentleman in attendance:

Y.W. Can ar’ave wan av them ther airy coawts?

G.I.A (wanting to put Y.W. at ease) Can yer wat??

Y.W. A said, Can ar’ave wan a’ them ther ‘airy coawts?

G.I.A. Yis! Wass fur?

Y.W. (impatiently) Fer the judy, of carse!

* wacker = scouser = Liverpool man

(Note: I doubt if there is any system of phonetic signs known to man that can reproduce a Liverpool accent)

lionello - 09 February 2011 01:00 PM

I doubt if there is any system of phonetic signs known to man that can reproduce a Liverpool accent)

There are certainly homophones in Scouse you won’t find in too many other Englishes. I particularly enjoyed the ladies’ hairdressers in the heart of Liverpool called “Her Cuts”.

Don’t worry, Venomousbede, you’re on the right track now. ‘Hoek’ does mean corner or angle, any angle actually. English ‘hook’ is ‘haak’ in Dutch. To confuse things, a right angle is often called ‘haaks’. ‘Haak’ and ‘hoek’ are etymologically related.

The element is used in many place names. Usually these places are at prominent crossroads or where two rivers or dykes meet or at whatever people thought of as a ‘hoek’. (like the promontory at Hoek Van Holland). I bet that Kinderhook fits in here as well. The element also comes back in many toponymic family names, like Van der Hoek, Van Hoecke etc. (of which Hoekstra is the Frisian form).

The corner of a room is accapareren or opkopen?
I think you may be misreading the dictionary entry there. A corner of a room is called a ‘hoek’ as well. Accapareren is indeed an obsolete verb, meaning ‘to buy up’ or ‘opkopen’ in modern Dutch, but I have no idea what it is doing in that lemma about ‘hoek’.

EDIT:
is like an enclave or area (corner) within a town
What I forgot to mention is that indeed somtimes ‘hoek’ is used for ‘area, quarter’ as a synonym for ‘wijk’. Cf. ‘Jodenhoek’.

Accapareren is indeed an obsolete verb, meaning ‘to buy up’ or ‘opkopen’ in modern Dutch

I’m thinking vb has got a dictionary entry that is alluding to the sense of “corner the market”.  Bilingual dictionaries can be dangerously misleading if you don’t already have some knowledge of both languages.

Accapareren is indeed an obsolete verb, meaning ‘to buy up’ or ‘opkopen’ in modern Dutch
I’m thinking vb has got a dictionary entry that is alluding to the sense of “corner the market”.

similar to the Spanish acaparar, “to hoard, to stockpile”. I think there’s a similar word in French.

Thanks for explaining that, dutchtoo, and to Dr T for suggesting I don’t have ‘some knowledge’ of English either though after my many gafffes he could be right - and his ‘corner the market’ makes perfect sense.
It’s very enriching that we have bilingual contributors here.

Dr T for suggesting I don’t have ‘some knowledge’ of English

The logical (and intended) interpretation of my remark was that you didn’t have some (i.e, a meaningful degree of) knowledge of Dutch.  A person who knows one of the languages but not the other does not know “both languages”.