This contribution based on fieldwork in the archives of geographical and mountaineering societies in London, Berlin, Paris and Grenoble first looks at some of the scientific and diplomatic debates raised by the existence of Mount Everest as a place name, and examines key arguments put forward to defend or criticize its use from its suggestion by the surveyor general of India Andrew Waugh at the Royal Geographical Society in 1858 to current discussions on the enduring presence of mountain exonyms in post-colonial toponymical and cartographical contexts. _x000D_
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Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the initial controversy between Waugh and Brian Hodgson, a naturalist and keen linguist who was then British resident at Kathmandu, was echoed by extensive commentaries on the use of non-local names in mountain toponymy and cartography. Those debates notably show that before the name of the peak became a symbol of European onomastic imperialism, it is first and foremost the commemorative use of a personal name that was considered a case of failed geographical nomenclature that would certainly soon be replaced by a better name. Then why has this name not been supplanted by a more fitting toponym yet? Will it ever be? _x000D_
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I propose to use perspectives from critical geography, the linguistics of names, and pragmatics to formulate three hypotheses on the future of exonymic place-names, from Mount Everest to other cases in the Himalayas, the Alps and the Pamir._x000D_
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Felix de Montety
Université Grenoble Alpes

 
ID Abstract: 753