Astronaut into space, Yuri Gagarin in 1961, they chose a term which anglicizes to "cosmonaut". In English-speaking nations, a professional space traveler is called an "astronaut". The term derives from the Greek words "ástron" (ἄστρον), meaning "star", and "nautes" (ναύτης), meaning "sailor". The first known use of the term "astronaut" in the modern sense was by Neil R. Jones in his 1930 short story "The Death's Head Meteor". The word itself had been known earlier; for example, in Percy Greg's 1880 book "Across the Zodiac", "astronaut" referred to a spacecraft. In "Les Navigateurs de l'Infini" (1925) by J.-H. Rosny aîné, the
Chinese as a foreign language were studying the language in US colleges and universities. While far behind the more than 800,000 students who study Spanish, the number is more than three times higher than in 1986. The Institute's report includes graphs and details on the popularity of other languages. As of 2008, China had helped 60,000 teachers promote its language internationally, and an estimated 40 million people were studying Chinese as a second language around the world. Other than Standard Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other variant of Chinese that is widely taught as a foreign language. It is the official language of Hong Kong