Cachemire, cashmere or kashmir?
The correct wording of the word Cashmere, which we use a lot on our website, has led some readers and customers to ask us about it.
Not only them, but, as can also be seen from the website of the authoritative Accademia della Crusca, many users have turned to them for clarification on which is the correct diction to use.
We are of course talking about the famous fabric made from the wool produced by the goat native to the Indian region of Kashmīr, the capra hircus.
So, in an article that appeared on the official website of the well-known Accademia della Crusca , it seems that while Italians no longer have any doubts about how to pronounce the name of this precious worsted wool fabric [’kaʃmir] , there are several ways they can choose to write it.
The most widespread ways of writing, according to the authoritative source, seem to be the "French" one i.e. cachemire and the other "English" i.e. cashmere.
According to the Crusca academics, both ways of writing mentioned above are correct; you can opt for one or the other depending on whether you prefer to rely on the authority of dictionaries, which still favor cachemire, or follow current usage , more decidedly oriented towards cashmere.
The Accademia della Crusca in its interesting article textually recallsthe French spelling is implicitly chosen by the most recent editions of popular usage dictionaries, which bring to main lemma cachemire: thus the Grande Dizionario Hoepli by Aldo Gabrielli (2015), the Devoto-Oli 2017, the Italian Garzanti dictionary (2017), the ZINGARELLI 2018, the Treccani Vocabulary online; GRADIT differs from this practice and adopts cashmere as its main lemma.
The abundance of variants, beyond these two which are the most popular (some dictionaries cite further forms such as cascimir, cascimirra, cashmere, casimir, casimira, casimiro, casimirra, kashmir)testifies to the wide diffusion and vitality of this foreign voice.
The greatest difficulty in writing it, as it seems from the article taken from the Crusca website, is given by the rendering of the phoneme /ʃ/ (corresponding to the sound -sc- in discensa) followed by a consonant, a problem, because it is not really Italian.
This phoneme /ʃ/, in the past was more easily associated with the sound of -than- French (e.g. cachet, chef, pastiche), but having recently had greater familiarity and contact with English in Italian he is gradually associating this voice with the sound that -sh- ha in English (e.g. crash, shampoo, shopping).
The academics do not stop only at dictionaries, which still remain a cornerstone of our written and spoken language, but with a very current approach they talk in their article about the Google search engine, which would now act as a mirror of the predominantly consolidated use of term, which at the time of writing the article provided 142 million results for cashmere and approximately 11 million for cashmere. Also not to be underestimated is the frequency of the word kashmir which with 83 million results definitely exceeds that of cachemire.
The current greater success, in the use of the English writing method cashmere can also be verified by considering other interesting data such as those referring to the brands registered.
From a check carried out in 2017 by the Crusca academics among those deposited in Italy from 1980 to 2017, the word cashmere appears in 305 cases, cachemire in 35 and kashmir in 22 and has to do with both trademarks of names or signs of companies and products.
Regarding the history of the word Cashmere, we know that it derives from the name from the Indian region of Kashmīr the region of origin of the hircus goats from which the textile fiber of the same name is obtained.
Together with the fabric, as reported by the Accademici della Crusca, which was initially made in English, it arrived in Italy and especially in Lombardy via France, also the word that named it and would have done so via the French casimir, who in turn had taken it from the English cassimer.
According to the lexicographic sources cited by the Accademici della Crusca, which we report in full:the first attestation of the word in Italian dates back to 1797, when, in the casimir form, it was recorded in the Dizionario universale critico-enciclopedico by D'Alberti of Villanova; in the same form, the casimir cloth had already been found since 1787 in the "Giornale delle Nuove Modes di Francia e d'England" (Milan, 1786-1794). The full entry into fashion of the casimir would instead only have occurred in the 1830s, as evidenced by the hundreds of attestations that appear in the "Corriere delle Dame" (Milan, 1804-1875) starting from this period.
The first use in Italian of the term cashmere seems to date back to the end of the 19th century, even if the form must have remained a minority at least for the entire first half of the twentieth century, given that the The Accademia della Crusca recalls as many as eight editions of Panzini's Modern Dictionary (1905-1942) which continued to report cashmere or possibly the adaptation casmir, now declared old or obsolete by practically all current dictionaries.
The passing of the baton from cachemire to cashmere seems to be placed between the end of eighties and the very first nineties of the twentieth century, therefore a century after the first appearance of the form cashmere, probably due to the widespread Englishism that invaded our language from those years onwards.
Let's not forget that the word could sometimes be badly transcribed: it is not written casmere nor cassmere, as we occasionally see in some web searches.
