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 China. After this period, only Cantonese and Mandarin remained as the most influential variants of Chinese, the former due to the importance of maritime trade in Guangzhou and the emergence of Hong Kong as a key economy in East Asia. Chinese departments in the West were largely centered on Cantonese due to British colonial rule over Hong Kong until the opening of communist-ruled China starting in the 1970s. The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language in the People's Republic of China started in 1950 at Tsinghua University, initially serving students from Eastern Europe. Starting with Bulgaria in 1952, China