From what I’ve found on google, the fabric cashmere comes from a goat called Kashmir found primarily in an area called Kashmir and its surroundings. So why do we spell it cashmere and not kashmir?
Because cashmere wool comes from cashmere goats, not the country Kasimir.
That’ll teach me to read the actual OP and not just the title. :smack:
I believe that its simply a question of spelling. Hindi and the related languages that are spoken in and around the Kashmir area are phonetic, thus a “k” sound and a hard “c” sound are perfectly interchangeable, likewise the “mir” and “mere”. Hence Kashmir = Cashmere. They are pronounced exactly the same, and can refer interchangably to the same things.
My compact OED (1st edition, not new) says it is used attributively from the name of a kingdom in the western Himalayas, Cashmere or Kashmir. It appears that the name therefore came from the country and moved onto the goats and then to their wool. First used in print 1822.
Oddly, there is no entry for Kashmir or any nearby variant.
Not by me they’re not.
“Cashmere” is Anglicised – [k<h>&Zmi@r] – “a” as in cat – “sh” like the “s” in “measure” – “mere” rhymes with “here.”
“Kashmir” is [kaSmir] – the “k” is unaspirated – the “sh” is as in “shirt”* – the “i” is a pure vowel (not diphthongized)
*No Indian language has the “French J” or “zh” sound like the “s” in “measure.”
What exactly do you mean when you say a language is “phonetic”?
To answer the OP, it’s that the British began commerce and then colonization in India in the 17th and 18th centuries, a time when the spelling of English itself hadn’t yet become standardized, let alone the transliteration of other alphabets.
It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that standardized transliterations of the Arabic and Devanagari alphabets began to be used by academicians (and eventually cartographers, post-WWII). Before that, spelling was haphazard and reflected the colonialists’ approximation of the native sounds they thought they heard, rendered according to the maddening vagaries of English spelling. Just try reading anything from the 18th- or 19th-century British Raj, and compare their spellings with the modern, standardized spellings based on a systematic transliteration from the Devanagari. E.g. Cawnpore <> Kanpur. Etc.
In a volume of Arabian Studies published by Cambridge University in England, I once read an account of the diary of a 17th-century English coffee merchant who was stationed at Mocha in the Yemen. At times he traveled into the coffee-growing hinterland to make purchases, to a highland town whose Arabic name is Bayt al-Faqîh.
The Englishman wrote down this name as “Beetlefuckee.”
That the symbols in a language’s “alphabet” are better represented by a syllable rather than a single letter sound. This is the case with languages such as Hindi and Gujerati. I’m sorry I didn’t make this clearer.
I have seen Cashmere and Kashmir used interchangeably, and pronounced identically. Personally, I honestly cannot see how the two could be pronounced differently, but maybe that’s just me, and a good few years of transliterating things between Gujerati/Hindi and English has made me slightly oblivious.
Nitpick: Urdu is an Indian language that does have this sound, and a special letter of the alphabet to write it with. However, it occurs only in a very few loanwords from Persian (making this a very minor nitpick). You would be correct in stating that it is not found in any native words in any Indian languages.
Just FYI. That would be Kashmir. It is not a country. It is a part of India and, officially, is a state that goes by the full name of ‘Jammu and Kashmir’.
As acsenray mentions, because of anglicization, ‘cashmere’ is generally pronounced so that its syllables rhyme with ‘gash’ and ‘here’. ‘Kashmir’, on the other hand would be pronounced with ‘kash’ as in ‘hush’, and ‘mir’ as in ‘meer’.
A phonetic language is one where the sounds correspond exactly to the letters as they are written. So, English is only a partly phonetic language. For instance, if I try to say the word ‘write’ aloud according to the spelling, I would end up articulating something like ‘waritee’.
A lot of Indian languages are phonetic, and knowing the alphabet should be good enough to let you atleast read, if not understand, words in general.
<sigh>
The wool is named for the goat.
The state is named for the Led Zeppelin song.
<nitpick>
And Urdu isn’t really an Indian language. Urdu first emerged as the dialect of Multan, which whilst part of the more general “Indian subcontinent” has been Pakistani territory since Partition. <nitpick>
<Nitpick about Nitpick>
Actually, if you trace the roots of Urdu waaaay back, it is partly descended from Sanskrit. Cite.
Furthermore, Urdu is one of the national languages of India.
</N a N>
Of course, in sheer numbers, Pakistan probably has a lot more users of the language than does India.
That is not true. Urdu originated in the Delhi-Agra area of U.P. The Multani dialect is Lahnda, another language altogether, which partly resembles Panjabi and partly is like Sindhi. Urdu is the same basic language as Hindi. Urdu was born in India and imported to Pakistan.
In my experience, “here” and “meer” rhyme.
Now that we’ve nitpicked whether Pakistan is part of “India” (yes, it is – part of the subcontinent called “India,” but not part of the nation on that subcontinent referred to as “Bharat” in its own constitution and “India” by English speakers)…
There are numerous cases where English over the years has Anglicized the spelling and/or pronunciation of “foreign” terms adopted as standard English usage, while the indigenous people go on calling the place by their own name, and modern usage, more courteous of “foreign” sounds, uses the local pronunciation to refer to that community. I grew up, for example, learning that the big city on India’s west coast where xash lives was Bombay, and certain products associated with that city were described as “Bombay [thing]” – today we refer to it, as its inhabitants always have, as Mumbai.
Probably the closest parallel to “cashmere/Kashmir” is the wool produced by long-haired goats and rabbits in the area around the city in central Turkey that has been its capital since 1922 or so. The old name of the city, dating back to Byzantine times, and hence the name of the wool, is “Angora” – but we now refer to the city by the Turkish variant on this universally used by its residents: Ankara.
The southeastern dialect of Low German closely related to Plattdeutsch and Nederlandisch but considered a national language of Belgium is Vlaamisch, and the area where it is spoken is Vlaander(e)n. Since the Middle Ages, though, English speakers have referred to this as “Flemish” and “Flanders” respectively (and the inhabitants as “Flemings,” for which I don’t know the “proper” usage).
The poultry raised around Livorno, Italy, and the city itself, are “Leghorn” in English – giving rise to the WB cartoon character.
The capital of Russia, Moskva, is Englished as Moscow, and the surrounding area, which was the original state from which the Tsarist regime spread, is Muscovy – both have become English adjectives for products from there.
The nation whose capital is Zagreb is locally known as Hrvatskija – and two variants on this have become English usage. First, influenced by Austrian German and perhaps Magyar, the country itself is known in English as Croatia. But the neckwear first produced there and part of formal national attire is the cravat.
One might add that the original “Kashmir” is has two variant usages: as a physical-geography descriptor, it refers to a fertile highland valley in the middle of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. But as a political descriptor, it refers to the pre-1947 princely state held by a Hindu maharaja but much of whose population was Muslim, since divided between India (about 60%), Pakistan (about 30%), and China (who seized 10% of the mountain area for strategic reasons and has retained it). All the territory remains subject to a three-way dispute that occasionally strains Indian/Pakistani relations.
Not exactly. “Mumbai” is the Marathi version of the name and has traditionally been used by Maharashtrians speaking in Marathi. However, Bombay is a very diverse city, with large populations of Gujaratis and other Indian ethnic groups. Most of these people “always” have and still do refer to the city as “Bombay.” Even Maharashtrians often use the name “Bombay,” especially when speaking English, which is commonly used in professional situations.
This is true of most of the renamed cities of India. The local inhabitants have continued to use the old, colonial name without any problems (such as Benares) while westerners have been convinced that it is disrespectful to use any but the nativised name (such as Varanasi).
Sorry for the zombie, but someone was wrong on the internet.
Nitpick: it’s Hrvatska.
But yes, Anglicised spellings such as “Cashmere” and “Hindoo” do now seem rather quaint and redolent of colonialism. I think that’s why we now tend to use more faithful (or perhaps just more “foreign-sounding”) transliterations.
It’s a zombie, but their is a good point to be made here as to why several South Asian names are pronounced differently than how they are spelt in English. The answer is that the transliteration spellings of the names were done before the pronounciation was settled and as there are many languages in S Asia pronunciations was different amongst the peoples. So the transliteration might have been done from one language and eventual pronounciation from another.
Which is why “Punjab” is spelt like that, it’s been transliterated from Farsi, while the pronunciation is more like “Panj Ahb”.
For reasons unknown to me, the British preferred the letter C instead of K when anglicizing local names. Here are some examples :
- Kolkata - Calcutta
- Kanpur - Cawnpore
- Kochi - Cochin
- Kadapa - Cuddapah