Through the founding of the legendary ascent of Sagarmatha by Tenzing Norgay ‘Sherpa Tenzing’ and Sir Edmund Hilary (New Zealand, British mountaineer), the name of ‘Sherpa’ came to be introduced to the whole world with the joint ascent and reaching of the summit of Sagarmatha/Mt Everest on 29th May 1953. Commencing in the pre-consumerist second half of the 20th Century the ascent put Nepal and the Sherpa People through Sherpa Tenzing and Sir Edmund Hillary’s heroic feat, truly on the global ‘map.’ Fast forward to the late 2010’s: mass ‘conquering Everest’ tourism choking the sacred mountain for tens of miles around in plastic waste, and with the traditional economy drawn off, often largely submerged through the overseas/international visitors mountaineering support economy.
There has consequently been overseas money brought into Nepal’s economy through ‘the Everest, follow in the footsteps of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay factor’ and at the same time an unintended ecological disaster turning upside down the region of the Sherpa People’s society and culture. The government of Nepal is taking exceptional ‘era of climate change awareness’ action on this with the Sherpa people of Solum Khumbu (and indeed other regions of Himalayan Nepal) on the flood of plastic items that the international visitor-mountaineers understandably, at this point in time, have dependency on to live and achieve their mountaineering quests.
For every person that ascends Sagarmatha has to in returning collect and dispose of a weight-specified amount of plastics left on the rocky slopes and in the snows of the World’s highest mountain. As such, change is coming to the land of the Sherpas on a blight that was never foreseen in Hillary and Norgay’s time but which through the advent and subsequent industrial scale development of ‘mountaineering tourism’: of this the People of the land of their birth, the Sherpas, are understandably happy because in addition to counteracting climate change considerations, the all-important reverence for the soil, rock, snows and ice of their land and its peaks, glaciers, caves, slopes, cliffs at the heart of traditional, ancient Sherpa culture, is starting to be respected from national to international levels.
Names matter:
Names matter, and a numerically very small people can through their traits of devoted focused technical dedicated expertise lend their name to global level public service traits and activity.
The most important way at start off level to come to know about a people, culture, country, nation is to learn of the literal translations and/or meaning of key names and words relating to a given people and culture. There is a short component of this information resource on key and example Nepali names, but here we highlight for the Sherpa People of Nepal two names to properly fulfil the purpose of all those seeking knowledge about the latter and their land, and how these express culture and outstanding human traits. One concerns the variations in different language of the name of Planet Earth’s highest mountain, and the other the global borrowing of the name ‘Sherpa’ itself.
Mount Everest / Sagarmatha (Chomolungma) – different, South Asian, and Western colonial era approaches to naming a mountain:
As mentioned towards the start of the Sherpa section of this information resource in the Sherpa language the name of world’s tallest mountain is Chomolungma (“World Mother Goddess”), and spelled and pronounced almost identically in Tibetan, ‘Quomolungma’, reminding us of the Tibetan origin (location: Kham in Eastern Tibet) and close ethnic and cultural affinities with Tibet, of the Sherpa Peoples, who migrated from that fabled land (for centuries a mighty empire as great as China or the much earlier Mauryan Empire) some 600+ years ago to Solu Khumbu and other locations in the Himalaya.
The Nepali name for Mt Everest is comprised of the two Nepali words ‘sagar’ and ‘matha’; Sky and Head (Head of the Earth touching Heaven), respectively – a functional descriptive yet poetic name for the highest point in the world. Sagar is also a personal name in Nepali. A Nepali historian, Baburam Acharya (1888–1971) reputedly gave this name to the mountain as there had been until this point no official Nepal state recognised name for Chomolungma (Sherpa name for the mountain). Source: https://www.quora.com/Who-named-Mt-Everest-as-Sagarmatha
Enter … ‘Mount Everest’:
‘In 1852 the British-sponsored Great Trigonometrical Survey, which had been mapping the Indian subcontinent since the early 1800s, identified the highest mountain in the world straddling Nepal and Tibet in the Himalayas. The British initially referred to the 29,035-foot-tall pinnacle as Peak XV until Andrew Waugh, the surveyor general of India, proposed that it be named for his predecessor, Sir George Everest.
Born in Wales on July 4, 1790, Everest attended military schools in England before spending much of his adult life in India. After working for the East India Company, the geodesist joined the Great Trigonometrical Survey in 1818 … working his way up to superintendent in 1823 and then surveyor general of India in 1830. …
Everest, who had favored native place-names as a surveyor, objected to Waugh’s proposal that the highest peak in the world be named in his honor. Although the Tibetans already called the mountain Chomolungma (“Goddess Mother of the World”), Waugh was apparently unaware of that indigenous moniker or those used in Nepal, which had barred the survey team from crossing its borders*. “I was taught by my respected chief and predecessor, Colonel Sir George 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,” Waugh wrote to the Royal Geographical Society in 1856. In spite of Everest’s argument that locals would have difficulty pronouncing his name, the society decided in 1865 to dub the world’s tallest peak Mount Everest anyway. The 76-year-old Everest died the following year on December 1, 1866. It’s unknown whether he ever glimpsed his namesake mountain.’
Source: https://www.history.com/news/who-is-mount-everest-named-after
* Nepal was an independent state not a British colony or ‘protectorate’ and entry had to be authorised
Ironically therefore, the man whom the mountain was named after in an age when European colonial power regarded imposing English/European language names on major geographical and topographical features such as seas, mountains, rivers as a mark of Eurocentric supremacist might and cultural appropriation/misappropriation (a very common phenomenon in lands such as the USA and Australia where the names for these accorded in ancient times by indigenous/first peoples were ignored and routinely replaced ‘Ayres Rock’ etc.) actually had an enlightened spiritually attuned post-colonial perspective that rejected such an imposition of a name.
Sherpa: The word ‘Sherpa’ has taken on in the English-speaking world connotations of a Nepali people supreme in mountaineering skills ultimate ‘knowledge of terrain’ path-makers for mountaineers from across the globe, guiding and protecting from danger the latter. It has by a logical transference to political, heads of state, and diplomatic domains, meaning ‘emissary’ that has come to be the chosen term for path-making and masterly preparation for matters of state, especially international conferences of the greatest moment – an incredible but so well-deserved tribute to the attributes and capabilities of the actual Sherpas themselves in life or death settings in the World’s highest mountains!
A sherpa[1] is the personal representative of a head of state or government who prepares an international summit, particularly the annual G7 and G20 summits. Between the G7 summits there are multiple sherpa conferences where possible agreements are laid out. … The sherpa is generally quite influential, although they do not have the authority to make a final decision about any given agreement. The name is derived from the Sherpa people, a Nepalese ethnic group, who serve as guides and porters in the Himalayas, a reference to the fact that the sherpa clears the way for a head of state at a major summit.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherpa_(emissary)
As such the name Sherpa belongs to a very, very, small number of names of peoples that have become epitomes for their characteristics at a human nature prowess level (such as ‘Stoic’ or ‘Spartan’ or even ‘Amazon’).