A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
chamois
The chamois is a goat-antelope of the European and Turkish mountains, compact and dark-faced, with slender black horns that hook backward at the tip. It works ground that looks impossible, crossing near-vertical rock on hooves with hard rims and soft elastic centers, and it moves fast over terrain where a person would be roped up. In summer it goes above the treeline and in winter it drops into forest.
Etymology
English took the word from French, and French got it from a mountain language that was being spoken in the Alps before Latin ever arrived. Almost nothing else of that language survives, but the animal’s name does, and it went into German as gams and Italian as camoscio as well. The soft leather called chamois, and the shammy cloth in the garage, are the same word: originally the animal’s own hide, oil-tanned.
Notes
The tuft of long hair from a chamois’s back is worn on Alpine hats and was traditionally taken as evidence that the wearer had been where the animal goes. The species is widespread now across the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, and the Balkans, and has been introduced to New Zealand’s Southern Alps.