Astronaut spacecraft bound for Earth orbit or beyond. NASA also uses the term as a title for those selected to join its Astronaut Corps. The European Space Agency similarly uses the term astronaut for members of its Astronaut Corps. By convention, an astronaut employed by the Russian Federal Space Agency (or its Soviet predecessor) is called a "cosmonaut" in English texts. The word is an anglicisation of the Russian word "kosmonavt" (, ), one who works in space outside the Earth's atmosphere, a space traveler, which derives from the Greek words "kosmos" (κόσμος), meaning "universe", and "nautes" (ναύτης), meaning "sailor". Other
Chinese as a foreign language Chinese in Europe. In 1837, Nikita Bichurin opened the first European Chinese-language school in the Russian Empire. Since then sinology became an academic discipline in the West, with the secular sinologists outnumbering the missionary ones. Some of the big names in the history of linguistics took up the study of Chinese. Sir William Jones dabbled in it; instigated by Abel-Rémusat, Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor. Local Chinese variants were still widely used up until a Qing dynasty decree in 1909 that mandated Mandarin as the official language of