The two words are “Nags Head” (the North Carolina coastal town we often visit). Idiomatic translations would be most appreciated. Thanks!
Place names don’t really translate most of the time. According to Wikipedia, in Dutch, Polish, Portuguese and Volapük, it’s “Nags Head”.
Agsnay Eadshay
So are you looking for a literal translation of “The head of the old broken down horse”?
Well, “Horse’s Head” would be Hua Ma in Thai. (That’s Ma with a high tone; a rising tone would mean “dog” instead of “horse.”) I’m not sure how they would do “nag.”
Or head of an annoying spouse.
In Spanish, “cabeza de whatever” would work. Some explorer or adventurer named Cabeza de Vaca was “Cow’s Head” and somebody who knows Spanish better than my 11th grade version might supply you with all sorts of things that have heads.
Just remember that “head” in this case is “headland,” and a cognate of “cape,” “cabo,” etc.
However, he did say idiomatic is appreciated. . . .
Yup. I’m branching out. 
Kaakinpää
-Finnish, literal translation…
I wouldn’t bat an eye to see it as a place name… “pää” translates to either “head” or “the end of <something>”.
Järvenpää, literally “end of the lake” is located at the end of a lake.
And there is a place called Kaakinmäki = Nag’s Hill.
Merraneset or merraodden in Norwegian. (Both actual place names in Norway.) Both meaning the female horse’s pointy bit of land into the sea.
Ei merr (def. form merra) has negative connotations, although they’re not the same as those of nag.
In German, assuming that ‘head’ is roughly equivalent to Spanish ‘cabo’ (which I translate as ‘cape’): Klepperskap or Gaulskap. Klepper and Gaul are both terms that would translate ‘nag’ (in the sense of ‘broken-down old horse’), and Kap is the word for ‘cape’ (‘part of land that juts into the water’).
‘Head’ (as in ‘cranium’) is Kopf. So, Klepperskopf or Gaulskopf. But Kopf isn’t used geographically, while Kap is.
Spanish would probably be Cabo del Caballo. I don’t know if Spanish has a specific word for ‘nag’, so I used the word for ‘horse’. I looked it up, and ‘nag’ comes out as jamelgo, but I’ve never heard that word before, and I’m not sure if that would translate. Cabo del Jamelgo sounds plausible, but I’m not at all fluent in Spanish, so I anxiously await the arrival of someone more knowledgeable than I am.
Neezag’s Heezead.
Now that I thought about it, it could also be Kaakinniemi… but “niemi” is literally “a peninsula”; which would remove the “head” wordplay in the original… and I do like me some head.
well it depends on what we mean by head and by nag.
in spanish it could be “cabeza de gruñon”, if we are talking about a naggy person.
“cabeza de jamelgo” if it’s a horse. or substitute cabo for cabeza.
depends where you want to go with it.
Y’all know the fable about Nag’s Head, doncha? First of all, the Outer Banks are known for their shifting sands. The weather pushes the islands around like sand dunes and this caused many, many shipwrecks. Second, the area was a haven for pirates in the 17th century. Those two things are undoubtedly true.
Legend has it that pirates, during storms used to take lanterns and put them around the necks of horses. They’d then run these horses parallel (or horizontal, I’ve heard both) to the beach. This mimiced the bobbing of harbored ships’ lights from the point of view of ships out at sea, as as the saying goes, “any port in a storm”. So the ships would see these lights, head for the “harbor”, and run aground. The pirates then “did what pirates do best” to the stranded vessels.
Thus the name “Nag’s Head”.
Na-shizz-ag’s-Heh-shizz-ed
LOL!
I’ll need to consult my dictionary for this one. Or perhpas An Gadai will help out. . .
In Latin, it would be Caput Caballi.
In Latin, “Caballus” was a slang word meaning “nag,” as opposed to “equus,” which was the standard word for a horse.
The modern, standard French and Spanish words for horse (cheval and caballo) come from the Latin slang word- perhaps because, in the hinterlands of the Roman empire, you were more likely to see a broken-down, flea-bitten caballus pulling a cart than you were to see a galloping “equus.”
That’s just an urban myth, though. It has no basis in fact. Wreckers would take advantage of a ship that foundered naturally, but they wouldn’t (and couldn’t) deliberately lure a ship onto the rocks.
Addresed in the Wikipedia article. It specifically mentions the Nag’s Head claim. Similar claims were made about Cornish wreckers, but this is also untrue, and debunked.
By the wayThe Nag’s Head is the local pub in a popular and long running British sitcom. I’m sure I’m not the only one to think you were talking about that.
The (rough) Afrikaans translation would be Perdekop [pear-duh-cawp, with the ‘r’ being rolled and the ‘aw’ being very short, like ‘cup’ only an -aw- sound], which translates to both “horse’s head” and “horse’s hill”, but doesn’t carry the broken-down or by-the-sea connotations. But it does havea Wikipedia entry. A closer translation would be something like “Ou Perdepunt” (“old horse-promontory”)[owe pear-duh-pint, with the ‘pint’ like in “pinto pony” not “pint of beer”]