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Chinese astronauts complete first space walk outside new Tiangong space station
- JumpCrisscross 5y agoBit of an aside, but do any other languages do the astronaut/cosmonaut/taikonaut B.S.?
- igloo_ghost 5y agoIndian “astronauts” are known as gaganauts, from the Hindi word for “sky.” This is the officially recognized term, though these has been some use of the term, “voyomanauts,” from the Sanskrit word for “sky.”
- qshaman 5y agoIn spanish is "cosmonauta"
- magicsmoke 5y agoAstronaut: English Cosmonaut: Russian Taikonaut: Chinese Spationaut: French Vyomanaut: Indian Based on their entries on wikitionary it looks like most phonetically written languages are able to express all these terms. Whether they commonly use them is a different question. From a cursory glance most of these are European languages such as English, German, French, etc. Languages like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Vietnamese, Thai, will use a term that's semantically correct but doesn't try to imitate phonetically. I'll go out on a limb and say this bullshit gives English a small bonus in being a global franca lingua (if you discount historical factors). It would be hard to communicate and discuss foreign ideas and words when you can't even express them concisely in your own language. Insert comments about programming languages and their pros/cons here for hacker news flavor.
- fuzzfactor 5y agoIn Italian they sometimes use an English term: Specimen ;)
- jfengel 5y agoDoesn't every language get to make up their own words? If there was a priority thing, shouldn't English speakers be using "cosmonaut"? They launched the first person into space, as well as the first one to orbit and a bunch of other accomplishments.