It’s located on 504 Seaview Road, Hawston (far as I can tell, it’s in Hermanus, South Africa.)
Tel # 315-1030.
Anyone know what it is?
I found it here.
It’s Suidelike, not Suicidelike! That makes it a little less interesting.
On the linked webpage, it is misspelled. I assume the misspelling originates in the “company” name. Perhaps the web page goofed it, though.
:smack: You’re right. It’s less interesting. But what is it?
Well, “maatskappy” apparently means “company”.
http://www.legalcity.net/Index.cfm?fuseaction=tools.getForm&form=CK4
“Suidelike” (not misspelled) is a geographic designation.
Weather chart for “Suidelike Africa”.
http://www.netfor.co.za/suidelike.htm
And “boot assistant” is a computer term, I have NO idea what it means.
So I’m guessing you’re looking at the South Africa Boot Assistant (meaning “Computer”) Company.
Close. Suidelike just means “southern.” A boot assistant is software that permits booting up from a volume that isn’t normally supported for boot-up. For example, you can’t boot from an external CD player hooked up to your USB port unless you install a a boot assistant.
So, “Southern Boot Assistant Company.”
I can’t imagine why a company (even in Redmond, Washington or the Silicon Valley, let alone South Africa) would specialize in computer boot disks, so I think there’s more to it than that.
The source language is Dutch. While shoe in Dutch translates to shoe in English, the same is not true of boot. Boot in Dutch translates to boat in English. It is a boat assistant (which may be no clearer, but is, at least, a better translation).
(I have, of course, leaped to the possibly unsupported conclusion that the compound word bootassistent is simply an agglutinative rendering of boot assistent. It is quite possible, of course, that bootassistent actually means boot assistant and is the computer term.)
Well, don’t feel bad, Tom. We’ve all leapt to conclusions about agglutinative renderings before.
umm, tomndebb ‘shoe’ in Dutch would be ‘schoen’. You’re right about boot being boat. I wouldn’t know what a boat assistent is, though. 
I’d imagine they’re pilots. As in helping ships make it into port
And the source language probably isn’t Dutch, but Afrikaans. They’re really closely related, but your average Boer is going to be a bit peeved if you tell him he’s speaking Dutch.
I’m afraid your unsupported assumption (and your valid translation) have betrayed you, Tom. It is indeed an agglutinative rendering of boot assistant. There is no common term “boat assistant,” in English, Dutch, or Afrikaans, whereas the word bootassistent, while not common, can be found on the web (in German) in a computer context.
I don’t really agree with Nametag. Hermanus, South Africa is on Walker Bay in South Africa, and is world-famous for whale watching (and not software development).
In Dutch (the root of most Afrikaans words) you would say: “Zuidelijke Bootsasisstent Maatschappij”
Zuidelijk means Southern, Maatschappij means company, and bootsassistent is either for a pilot which might be needed for the treacherous waters of Walker Bay, or it might be a boat that assists another boat, in other words, a kind of tug. I definitely think it has to be something nautical.
The simplest explanation is usually the best. The phrase “boot assistant” (invariably meaning the computer thingie) is all over the Web; the phrase “boat assistant” is not.
If you want a “pilot” in Afrikaans, you don’t ask for a “boat assistant”–you ask for a “piloot”. And if you want a sailor, you ask for a “matroos”.
http://www.southafrica.com/forums/showthread.php3?threadid=5002
It’s a cute, catchy name for a software company: “The Boot Assistant”.
Like “Boot Camp”.