Taxi is something that travelers use a lot of. You fly into a foreign city that speaks a language you don’t understand, but if the native population want to get your tourist money, they better know what you call a “car for hire” service. Seems like it is an easy word to say that could be quickly adopted by most languages for economic reasons.
Plus, cars have only been around for just 100 years, so there is no historic word for a taxi that goes back 1000 years. Every language would need to create a new word for that service, so might as well just adopt what other languages use. The same is true for a lot of technology terms. For instance, I know the word “computer” is very similar in Greek, Spanish, Italian, Russian and probably a ton of other languages.
Taxi is something that travelers use a lot of. You fly into a foreign city that speaks a language you don’t understand, but if the native population want to get your tourist money, they better know what you call a “car for hire” service. Seems like it is an easy word to say that could be quickly adopted by most languages for economic reasons.
Plus, cars have only been around for just 100 years, so there is no historic word for a taxi that goes back 1000 years. Every language would need to create a new word for that service, so might as well just adopt what other languages use. The same is true for a lot of technology terms. For instance, I know the word “computer” is very similar in Greek, Spanish, Italian, Russian and probably a ton of other languages.