- Mount Everest: named after Colonel Sir George Everest (1790-1866), British Surveyor General of India.
- K2: an early land-surveyor’s shorthand notation, used because nobody lived near enough to the mountain for it to have a local name.
- Himmelbjerget: “Mount Heaven”, 147 meters above sea level. Denmark’s highest point is in fact Møllehøj, “Windmill Barrow”, at 171 m a.s.l.
- Kebnekaise: “Kettle Peak”. Sweden’s highest mountain carries this name due to a misunderstanding between local Saami and surveyors, as the mountain with the concave peak is actually nearby Tolpagorni.
- Mount McKinley: the highest peak in North America, named by a gold prospector in the 1890s after US president William McKinley. The president hailed from Ohio, and there is an on-going conflict between the Congressional delegations of Ohio and Alaska over attempts on the latter’s part to rename the mountain Denali, which was its local name before the area became Anglicised.
Five Mountain Names
Posted by Martin R on January 31, 2011
(21)
Comments
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“Kebnekaise: “Kettle Peak”. Sweden’s highest mountain carries this name due to a misunderstanding between local Saami and surveyors, as the mountain with the concave peak is actually nearby Tolpagorni.”
Cue for Terry Pratchett reference
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I was going in to a conference in a Windhoek hotel when the Faculty secretary burst out laughing. “Why,” she wanted to know, “would they call a conference room ‘buttocks’?” All of the rooms were named after mountains and they had not bothered to find out the Oshiwambo meaning of ‘Omatakos’.
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Elephant Mountain, east of Barstow, California
34.8884,-116.8963
The name is due to the fact that when seen from the west it looks like an elephant, complete with trunk. This was first noticed and named by silver miners on the way to Calico.
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Mynydd Mawr in North Wales is locally known as Mynydd Eliffant (Elephant Mountain).
Lancashire’s Pendle Hill means hill-hill-hill. It’s disputed whether Torpenhow Hill (hill-hill-hill-hill) actually exists.
The Lake District has an Innominate Tarn.
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@Stewart: We get similar results in North America by combining English with Spanish or First Peoples names. For example, there is an area south of San Francisco known as the Los Altos hills (the the hills hills).
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Or California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains (mountain snow-covered mountains).
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I’m pretty sure the name of the great Danish peak is “Himmelbjerget”, without an s.
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Well, of course there are the Grand Teton mountains in Wyoming; some explorers were dreaming. And the Sandia mountains in New Mexico, which look like broken watermelons with the sunset cast upon them.
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Martin, shouldn’t you do one of these posts for lakes or other bodies of water? I mean, you live right next to Grötfatet (“The Porridge Bowl”)!
For inclusion in that list, I hereby nominate Långtarmen (“The Long Intestine”, in Lake Mälaren near Drottningholm) and Trälhavet (“The Slave Ocean”, next to Österåker).
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Denali, which was its local name
That is pretty much its local name again. Sounds like the Ohioans are in de”nali” about it.
There’s a strait off Hanko called Hauensuoli / Gäddtarmen – “Pike Gut”
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Arizona’s “Picacho Peak”, a volcano neck stub that is a prominent landmark between Phoenix and Tucson … translates as “peak peak”.
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I’m pretty sure most people would still call McKinley McKinley if the name got changed to Denali. It’s been that way too long and it’s ingrained into the culture.
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I just wanted to add that there is something named _after_ a mountain. To be precise, K3 surfaces have been thus named by André Weil in honor of K2 (which he had actually seen, if not climbed).
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“In algebraic geometry, a supersingular K3 surface is a K3 surface whose l-adic cohomology is generated by algebraic cycles”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersingular_K3_surface
Well whaddaya know?
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Some Oregon geographic names:
Jump Off Joe Canyon, in Gilliam County, Oregon
Jump-off Joe Mountain, in Grant County, Oregon
Jumpoff Joe Creek, in Josephine County, OregonAnd then there’s the State of Washington:
Jump Off Joe, a butte in Benton County, Washington
Jump Off Joe Lake, in Stevens County, Washington
Jump Off Joe Point, in Garfield County, Washington
Jumpoff Joe Creek, one of two streams in Stevens County, WashingtonOne wonders, Who was Joe?
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I heard a lovely story, possibly apocryphal but who cares, while working in Jordan: a British cartographer making the first map of a wild part of the country asked a passing bedouin what the name of the prominent hill on the horizon was. The bedouin replied ‘Wallahi ma baraf’, and so it was named on all the maps up to the present day. ‘Wallahi ma baraf’ means ‘Oh God, I dunno’.
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Hill near here called “Deid For Cauld” (Dead of (or, Will Die of) Cold).
Accurate enough, I fear.
And the “Deaf Heights” not so far away.
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