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Cover illustration: For centuries, Mt. Everest has been known as Lángkúr གླང་གུར་ [lāŋkūr] ‘tent of the ox’ or, more reverently, as Chòmólángmá ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ་ [ʨʰo̱mō lāŋmā] ‘grand mistress the female ox’, as written here in Roman Tibetan, native Tibetan script and phonetic notation respectively. Roman Tibetan is a new phonological transcription which phonemically represents spoken Tibetan in Roman script, comparable to Roman Dzongkha and Roman Drenjongke. In 1849, the mountain was first sighted by surveyors of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. Three years later, in 1852, Rādhānāth Sikdār and Michael Hennessy measured the height of the mountain to be 8,848 metres, conducting their measurements whilst standing on East India Company territory just outside of the Kingdom of Nepal. In 1865, the mountain was named after Sir George Everest, head of the Trigonometrical Survey. The Nepali name Sagarmāthā सगरमाथा was coined in the 1930s by Bāburām Ācārya. The older Nepali name for the entire massif, Mahālaṅgur महालङ्गुर, contains the Tibetan name for the mountain, once in use amongst speakers of Nepali too. Tibetans long knew that Lángkúr གླང་གུར་ [lāŋkūr] was the tallest mountain in the world or the mons omnium altissimus, as recorded by Athanasius Kircher (1667: 65–66, fold-out map between pp. 46–47), based on the first-hand reports of Jesuits who travelled through the Everest region from 1661 to 1662 on their way from Tibet to Kathmandu. This photograph of the Everest massif, taken by the author on a flight from Kathmandu to Paro, is emblematic of the Himalayan perspective adopted in this book. Nepal appears in the foreground, and Tibet stretches out to the horizon behind the Everest massif.
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ISSN 1568-6183
ISBN 978-90-04-44836-0 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-44837-7 (e-book)
Copyright 2021 by George van Driem.
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