At least when I was growing up in the '60s-'70s, the connotations of Sherpa were entirely positive; Wikipedia also doesn't indicate anything bad associated with the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherpa (well, who knows about the quality of the "psychedelic power pop band from Auckland, New Zealand" :-). A nice, helpful expert who because of nature and nurture was better suited to the extreme environment of the Himalayas, who therefore carried more stuff than the "white" with whom the two formed a team, and got serious billing along with the latter. Moderately well read people from my era give equal billing to the team of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary who first officially conquered the summit of Mount Everest.

Of course, not really following mass media since the '70s I don't know if the term has degraded since then, but at least it started from a good base. It's like the American usage of Indian tribe names for naming sports teams and Army helicopters, that's not done out of disrespect, although there are of course the inevitable malcontents.

> It's like the American usage of Indian tribe names for naming sports teams and Army helicopters, that's not done out of disrespect

What does it mean to say that "it's not done out of disrespect", when it's done even despite the objections of the ethnic group in question?

In this particular case, I can assure you that many Sherpa people very strongly object to the use of the word "Sherpa" as a synonym for "guide", and they do indeed feel it is very disrespectful.

"when it's done even despite the objections of the ethnic group in question"

I thought I addressed that with part you omitted quoting, "although there are of course the inevitable malcontents."

Who speaks for these people? Have they ever submitted these sorts of questions to a vote?

As long as e.g. there's a reasonable number of Apache tribes-members who are proud our biggest, baddest, proven in combat attack helicopter is named after them, I don't give a [expletive deleted] about the malcontents, most especially including the SJW crowd.

And if Sherpa has mutated into simply "guide", that's also addressed, in my "I can't speak for post-70s" qualification. Given your closeness to that situation, are all or even most of the "Sherpas" upset with all the connotations the word had accumulated in English over the decades? If you claim the latter, how do you know?

No, I'm correct and you're wrong. Irish, Polish, etc are nationalities not ethnicities.

Check wikipedia:

Sherpa (Tibetan: "eastern people", from shar "east" + pa "people") are an ethnic group from the most mountainous region of Nepal, high in the Himalayas.