Talk about stating the obvious. Who was under the impression that they weren't? What do these people want, an asterisk next to Hillary? Who cares? It's not news when a sherpa goes up, it's news when a pasty-faced white boy does. (related phenomenon: dunking in the WNBA).
China's pique at peak of colonial cheek (they want us to call Mt. Everest “Qomolangma”)
And...I'm still calling it "Everest", so there.
But she was named after the damned thing!
...Hillary Rodham "Qomolangma" Clinton.
CHINESE LECTURING WESTERN WORLD OF THE FINER POINTS OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.
Film at eleven.
...Tibet was *invented* by Al Gore, too.
Sincerely Glad To Be A
Recovering_Democrat.
This is the communist propaganda machine at its best: in an article on another topic, the claim that Tibet belongs to Chine is just "dropped in" for a succonsciense to consume.
It will always be Everest to me.
Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. Shouldn't we use all of them instead of our less respectful Germanic word when we're in Alaska?
If we use the prefix aqua instead of hydro aren't we discriminating against Greek people? Shouldn't we stick to our Germanic 'water'? Africans are what the Romans named the people living there. When we call people Africans or African Americans we are disrespecting them by this convoluted logic.
Some foreign words are extremely hard to pronounce if you didn't grow up speaking the tongue- note the French problem with the letter "H", the Japanese have trouble with some letters in English. It would be awfully pompous of me to insist that the Japanese use an American term for something when they are speaking in their own language- particularly if the word has a phoneme that doesn't even exist in their own language.
Other cultures have their ways of naming things- Western culture has its ways. In English we tend to name mountains in honor of a person instead of stringing together syllables which describe a physical attribute. In other words- every mountain is a mountain but it will be accompanied by the person honored. This isn't an across the board rule and people shouldn't get worked up about it. Forests and Rivers we tend to use native names or descriptive names as well as Person Honoring names. We're not sitting there thinking- "How can we best sh!t on the native culture while elevating our own- I know! Let's call it Mt McKinley!"
This is silly to the absurd. I'm pretty sure I've read that Everest has many different names depending upon which people you're talking to. The Chinese call it what they will. The Indians call it what they do, as do the Sherpas. We call it Everest.
What I do disagree with is giving Hillary sole credit for being the first man to summit this mountain. By his own account he and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay summited side by side. Who was the first man to summit? Two men summited together. Who was the first Westerner? Hillary. Imagine if a Sherpa had accompanied Armstrong to the moon, got out of the capsule, set up cameras and what not and then Neil jumps out and says "One small step for..." Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmond Hillary both did what nobody had ever done before- Sherpa or Westerner. They helped each other, relied on each other, probably would not have made it without each other. By their own words they summited together. They should get equal credit.
Sounds more like what my grandmother used to say after she sat down on the outhouse seat an hour after I last used it.