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 pronunciation to use.
We are naturally talking about the famous fabric made from the wool produced by the goat native to the Indian region of Kashmīr, the hircus goat.
So here in an article published on the official website of the well-known Accademia della Crusca, it seems that while Italians no longer have doubts about how to pronounce the name of this precious combed wool fabric [’kaʃmir], there are several ways among which they can choose to write it.
The most common ways to write it, according to the authoritative source, seem to be the "French" one, that is cachemire and the other the "English" one, that is cashmere.
According to the Crusca academics, both ways of writing mentioned above are correct; one can choose either depending on whether one prefers to rely on the authority of dictionaries, which still favor cachemire, or follow the current usage, more decidedly oriented towards cashmere.
The Accademia della Crusca in its interesting article literally recalls the Frenchified spelling is implicitly preferred by the most recent editions of popular usage dictionaries, which list cachemire as the main lemma: thus the Grande Dizionario Hoepli by Aldo Gabrielli (2015), the Devoto-Oli 2017, the Italian Garzanti dictionary (2017), the ZINGARELLI 2018, the Vocabolario Treccani online; the GRADIT deviates from this practice, adopting cashmere as the main lemma.
The abundance of variants, beyond these two which are the most common (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 term.
The greatest difficulty in writing it, 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 discesa) followed by a consonant, a problem because it is not really Italian.
This phoneme /ʃ/, in the past was more easily associated with the French sound of -che- (e.g. cachet, chef, pastiche), but having recently Italian had greater familiarity and contact with English it is gradually associating this term with the sound that -sh- has in English (e.g. crash, shampoo, shopping).
The academics do not stop at dictionaries alone, which 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 now reflects the predominantly consolidated use of the term, which at the time of writing the article provided 142 million results for cashmere and about 11 million for cachemire. Not to be underestimated is also the frequency of theword kashmir which with 83 million results clearly exceeds that of cachemire.
The current greater popularity, in the use of the English writing mode cashmere can also be verified by considering other interesting data such as those related to registered trademarks.
From a check made in 2017 by the Crusca academics among those filed in Italy from 1980 to 2017 the word cashmere appears in 305 cases, cachemire in 35 and kashmir in 22 and is related both to company names or signs and to products.
About the history of the word Cashmere, we know that it derives from the name of the Indian region of Kashmīr the region of origin of the hircus goats from which the homonymous textile fiber is obtained.
Together with the fabric, according to what is reported by the Accademici della Crusca, which was initially of English manufacture, it arrived in Italy and especially in Lombardy via France, also the word that named it and would have done so through the French casimir, which 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 would date back to 1797, when, in the form casimir, it was recorded in the Dizionario universale critico-enciclopedico by D’Alberti di Villanova; in the same form, the panno casimir was already found in 1787 in the “Giornale delle Nuove Mode di Francia e d’Inghilterra” (Milan, 1786-1794). The full fashion entry of casimir would have occurred only in the 1830s, as testified by the hundreds of attestations that appear from this period in the “Corriere delle Dame” (Milan, 1804-1875).
The first use in Italian of the term cashmere seems to be attested at the end of the 19th century, although the form was to remain a minority at least throughout the first half of the 20th century, since the Accademia della Crusca recalls as many as eight editions of the Dizionario moderno (1905-1942) by Panzini that continued to report cachemire or possibly the adaptation casmir, now declared outdated or obsolete by practically all current dictionaries.
The passing of the baton from cachemire to cashmere seems to be placed between the late eighties and the very early nineties of the twentieth century, thus a century after the first appearance of the form cashmere, probably due to the rampant Anglicism that has invaded our language since those years onwards.
Let us not forget that the word could sometimes be misspelled: it is not written casmere nor cassmere, as is sometimes seen in some web searches.
