You may have noticed in the media that spacemen are called different names depending on their nationality. Thus the term astronauts are reserved for the American space travellers, cosmonauts for the Russians, spationauts for the French/Europeans, taikonauts for the Chineese and vyomanauts for the Indians.
Even if only the first two are officially recognized, it is customary today that space powers show a particularly strong patriotism when it comes to naming their spacemen. This goes back to the Cold War period: the first human to go into space being a cosmonaut, the Americans did not want to use the same nomenclature.
Today there are 195 countries recognized by the United Nations… I let you imagine the number of terms that dictionaries of the world’s languages must accept if these countries send their citizens into space…. In this sense, and according to wikipedia, in 2008 linguist Frédéric Allinne asked the question:
[…] Some have propagated the idea that different terms should be used depending on the nationality of the spaceman […] This would be the only example in the entire French language of a trade name adapted to the nationality of the professional! A dancer, a cook or an architect do not change their name according to their country of origin. Nor in sport - a hotbed of chauvinism. In journalistic French, a skater and a swimmer remain a skater and a swimmer regardless of nationality.
I must admit that it is hard to disagree: in english we would call anyone going into space an astronaut, in french a spationaute, in Russian a kosmonaut and so on. For the great comfort of the future generations and their mental health, maybe we should start an international petition to remedy all this…Just my two cents…
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