Heh. Turns out, the name Sagarmatha is even newer than the name Everest! But still, using the Nepalese name makes more sense to me.

@InvaderXan Sagarmatha: sounds like an exciting, mystic place far away
Mount Everest: sounds like some boring small "mountain" somewhere in Alabama

@LunaDragofelis Right??

@LunaDragofelis @InvaderXan

"Sagarmatha: sounds like an exciting, mystic place far away"

My first thought was Magrathea. Which is pretty much what you said. :)

@InvaderXan Did you find out how it was named before?

@furkachi Not yet, but I’d be interested to know

@InvaderXan Welp, history digging time xD

@InvaderXan So apparently, according to McGill university it had no Nepalese name but had other ones, including the tibetan one you presented, but also:
" 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)"

[source: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/m/Mount_Everest.htm ]

@furkachi Ok, this is cool, nicely found! Devgiri. I shall have to remember that.

@InvaderXan It is pretty cool :3

@InvaderXan Our understanding is that the locals never saw a need to name the mountains in that range until after the white men started showing up, so if anything, all names for that mountain are a result of colonialism.

@KitsuneAlicia It's interesting how much stuff happened in the world because Europeans just assumed that everyone should do stuff the same way as them. Like how Tokyo is full of men wearing business suits. In Thailand they never originally had family names until Europeans showed up.

@InvaderXan Cultural appropriation and cultural expropriation are equally harmful if not done right, and Europeans clearly don't have a clue how to do it right.

@InvaderXan Sounds like you have come across the story. The punchline, imo, is that Sir George Everest pronounced his name "EEV-rest", so "EH-veh-rest" is at least a little not naming it after him 😂

@wlonk @InvaderXan
might as well go all the way
eve rest
([i:v] rest)

@carcinopithecus gon' show my linguist roots here and point out that the vowel reduced in the unstressed second syllable, so it was [ɨ], not [ɛ].

@wlonk i just use a schwa myself

i was proposing we take the not-really-him thing all the way and just reparse the letters of the name as totally different words

@carcinopithecus But wouldn't it end up being more like how he pronounced his name, if we did that? Bringing it full circle back to "more named after him" (which, hell, I didn't realize was a spectrum until I got into this.)

@wlonk ....crap, totally misread your non-ipa rendering lmao

@carcinopithecus I should just always use IPA, linguistics destroys your ability to render "phonetic" English orthography 😂

@InvaderXan Mt. McKinley in Alaska is actually called Denali in the indigenous language. Such a better name!

@ross Yeah, that's way better! And probably more meaningful too. I wonder if there's a story behind the name.

@ross @InvaderXan I think the name "Mount McKinley" has been dropped now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denali%E2%80%93Mount_McKinley_naming_dispute

@ross @InvaderXan yeah, I think Denali and Uluru (in Australia) are now better known than the colonial names. But apparently part of why Everest ended up called that was that it's so honkin huge that four or five different local groups had names for it and the colonial administrators didn't want to piss some of them off by making their rivals' name the official one

@ross @InvaderXan also part of the reason that McKinley was such a bad choice for a name is that he had literally nothing to do with Alaska, didn't oversee its purchase or transition to statehood or anything, didn't even visit as far as I know. It only happened because a dipshit senator from Ohio wanted to honor a fellow Ohioan. The same process that names branch post offices in small cities was used for the tallest mountain in North America.

@robotcarsley @ross From the account I read, pissing some of wasn’t a consideration. The argument was basically “we don’t know which name is most used, and Nepal and Tibet don’t like us anyway, so we’re going to just call it something totally different, k?” IDK, it came off more ad laziness than respect.

Glad people returned to the name Uluru though.

@InvaderXan
In Hungary we learned the mountain is called Mount Everest, and its highest peak is “Csomolungma”, which is a rough Hungarian version of the Tibetan name.

@gergely Oh, that’s interesting. So in a way, you learned both names!

@ashwinvis It's pretty amazing how far away mountains can be seen, provided the air is clear enough!

@officialcjunior It's a sight I'd love to see. Kathmandu is on my list of places to visit sometime. I hope these lockdowns prompt people to start clearing up air pollution.

@InvaderXan

And water.
The rivers over here been flowing with clear water since decades.