Tannas
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8,848 meters (29,028 feet)
In Nepal, the mountain is called Sagarmatha (सगरमाथा, Sanskrit for "Goddess of the Sky"); this name was invented in the early 1960s (by Baburam Acharya) when the Nepalese government realized that Mount Everest had no Nepalese name. This was because the mountain was not known and named in ethnic Nepal (the Kathmandu valley and surrounding areas). The Sherpa/Tibetan name Chomolangma was not acceptable, as it would have been against the idea of unification (Nepalization) of the country. However, the ancient name for the mountain is Devgiri (in Sanskrit, it means "holy mountain") or Devadurga (the English pronounced it as deodungha in the 1800s); please refer to the Harrapan archaeology site for more on the history behind the name. In Tibetan it is Chomolungma or Qomolangma (ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ) ("Mother of the Universe"), or in Chinese: 珠穆朗瑪峰 (pinyin: Zhūmùlǎngmǎ Fēng) or 聖母峰 (Shèngmǔ Fēng).
The mountain was given its English name in 1865 by Andrew Waugh, the British surveyor-general of India. With both Nepal and Tibet closed to foreign travel, he wrote:
…I was taught by my respected chief and predecessor, Colonel Sir Geo. Everest to assign to every geographical object its true local or native appellation. … But here is a mountain, most probably the highest in the world, without any local name that we can discover, whose native appellation, if it has any, will not very likely be ascertained before we are allowed to penetrate into Nepal.… In the meantime the privilege as well as the duty devolves on me to assign…a name whereby it may be known among citizens and geographers and become a household word among civilized nations.
Hence Waugh chose to name the mountain after George Everest, first using the spelling Mont Everest, and then Mount Everest. However, the modern pronunciation of Everest – IPA: [ˈɛvərɪst] or [ˈɛvərɨst] (EV-er-est) – is different from Sir George's own pronunciation of his surname, which was [ˈiv;rɪst] (EAVE-rest).
In 2002, the Chinese People's Daily newspaper published an article attacking the continued use of the English name for the mountain in the Western world, insisting that it should be referred to by its Tibetan name. Chinese marked the location Mount Qomolangma on their map more than 280 years ago, named after a Tibetans' Goddess Qomolangma, which gains ground as the peak's original name.[3] |
Travel
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Nepal 
No Spam
Adult 
Gambling
Unfinished
Deception
Plagiarism
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