Some of these non non-airline examples, on the other hand, follow a different logic, I would say. Epson and Lenovo are not English words, but made-up neologisms, even if, admittedly, they are made to be easily pronouned by speakers of English. Airbus got its name because the two component words are identical in English and French, to underline the European character of the company.
The name of Air India in Hindi is just “Air India” transliterated using Devanagari script — “e-a-r in-di-ya” — logo http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/2009/03/airindia2.gif
English is about 80% Latin based.
I live in Silicon Valley. You think I don’t know that? 
Well it’s not. It’s Pureisutēshon (プレイステーション). Completely different!
Link? This says 29%, including words you probably never say, and 29% French, e.g. Latin in only the most indirect way. So 58% “Latin.” I’m surprised the French is so low?
Spelling “Germanwings” alltogetherasoneword seems Verygermanliketome.
Surprised? English is still mainly an Anglo-Saxon language at its heart.
Another aspect of the Airbus name is that it’s supposed to emphasize the routine and everyday nature of modern airline flight. It’s a carefully crafted name with multiple facets.
Huh. This friend who sends me stuff sent me a slideshow about the coldest town in the world, somewhere in Siberia. One thing I noticed was that there was a stop sign that said STOP (not in Cyrillic) and there was a frozen fish store that said, FROZEN FISH.
On the other hand it did look pretty cold there, and there were some signs in Cyrillic. I guess they could have been different places, or Siberian stop signs could say STOP. I’ve wondered.
Yep. This process won’t turn German into English - it will just turn 20th cent. German into 21st cent. German. It’s certainly happened to English; one of the salient features of our language is the promiscuous eagerness with which it has borrowed vocabulary from languages as disparate as German, Arabic, and Malay.
As for air travel, according to Bill Bryson, English is the official language of international aviation. He didn’t say, but suggested that pilots and flight crews that fly internationally are required to use English, presumably for the same reason they’re required to use the Alpha-Bravo-Charlie alphabet, and call the number between eight and ten “niner”: to avoid miscommunication.
A German has expressed puzzlement to me that their stop signs read STOP instead of STOPP, which would be more proper german. (STOPPEN SIE or BITTE HALTEN would presumably be out of the question for obvious reasons.)
Same with Pakistan International Airlines, (PIA) and theirlogo is just the transliteration into Urdu of P-I-A.
Other Airlines have a name like Shaheen Air, AirBlue, Air Indus
. “Shaheen” means “Falcon”.
That apparent contradiction is only a result of the 1990s spelling reform, which in many instances preferred double consonants over signle consonants. Stoppen has always been the only correct spelling for the verb, but the command Stop was correctly spelt with a single P before the reform and a double P afterwards. The highway code where the sign is legally defined hasn’t been amended, however, and so even new STOP signs that are put up these days read only a single P.
Remove Pakistanis, and just have a group of Indians. I’m in an office right now where the Gujarati Indians and the Tamilian Indians have only English in common.
One of my friends back home and his wife only speak English, because they’re from neighboring cities, and the “language line” ran between them. I seem to recall their home towns are only about 20 km apart.
Just to clear this up –
Aviation requires a default common language because pilots are always flying to different countries with different languages. Early in the 20th Century various treaties were crafted regarding air travel, and one of them set English as the default lingua franca of pilots. (The runner-up was French, and it was apparently a pretty close vote. A lot of aviation terms are French in origin so that language was definitely an influence). The use of English in aviation is not a happenstance, it was mandated.
That said, “aviation English” is very much a truncated form of English. An international pilot might be very comfortable requesting take-off clearance or a change of altitude, but going to a local diner and ordering a sandwich might be beyond his/her English language skills. Aviation communications are quite formalized, even for native speakers of English. When you have someone for whom English is clearly not a native tongue the air traffic controllers frequently become even more stylized to minimize possible confusion.
It should be noted that use of English doesn’t always occur - a French pilot flying into a French airport with French ATC will most likely use French. It’s when you have a Belgium pilot flying into a Chinese airport (as a randomly picked example) that English-as-a-common-language becomes important.
I learned that in a college course and do not know the professor’s source, but here is one link. There are others.
Your wikipedia link seems to refer to a 1973 computerized survey of 80,000 words from the third edition of the shorter Oxford Dictionary. Depending on who is counting and what they, there are approximately 750,000 words in the English language.
What’s English about Lenovo? Legend was, but Lenovo is 100% more Latin than English.
Because they don’t sell the “Lovely Day Ubu-box Chrysanthemum” outside of Japan.
(Thinking of products like the Datsun “Fairlady-Z,” sold everywhere else as the 240Z. There seem to be a lot of home-market products with strange, fanciful names that don’t translate well, linguistically or culturally.)
I’ve never been to Siberia, but in western Russia they said STOP. English word, Roman alphabet.
My understudying is that stop signs in much of the world use the English word STOP. They certainly have everywhere I’ve ever travelled — Europe (inc. Germany) and the USSR (yeah, it was a while ago).
The one exception is Quebec, where all signs, government and commercial, have to be in French, or at least French first and English later and smaller. The stop signs there say ARRET.
(Waiting for a Quebecer to come by and correct details.)
Good point. But it’s certainly not a Chinese name.