Re: NATLANG: Scary Document

Quoting Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

>  --- Eamon Graham skrzypszy:
>
> > I know next to nothing about Russian; where does "aeroflot" come
> > from?
>
> "Flot" is the word for "fleet". So "aeroflot" means "air fleet". That's
> my
> guess, at least.
On the subject of aeroflot, how common internationally is the joke that Aeroflot
is the only airliner with more crashes than take-offs?*

More on-topic, on of the more attractive features linguistically of the good ol'
and thankfully dead Soviet Union was the prevalence of officialese abbrevs made
of the first bits of the constituent words, eg _Sovnarkom_, _SmerSh_, _GULag_.
Unfortunately, I've not managed to force similar habits on any of my conlangs.
Is anyone doing so for his/her conlang?

* Actually, last I checked, Aeroflot was not even close to the world's most
dangerous airline, being beaten by dozens and dozens of 3rd World airlines.
Still worse than most Western ones according to those figures, however.

                                                             Andreas

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