male goat = buck or billy
female goat = doe or nanny
young goat = kid
'Billy' goat is commonly known across registers, due to the fairy tale about
The Three Billy Goats Gruff. The others are commonly used within the sphere of rural life, agriculture, or animal husbandry. They might not be familiar or common knowledge to urban dwellers. There's also a '
wether', which is a castrated male goat.
Note that 'doe' is also used for a female deer.
adult goat meat = chevon
young goat meat = cabrito
I've never heard of these. The first sounds French, the second Spanish.
"chèvre" is French for a female goat, and "bouc" for a male but no "chevon" is listed.
'Chèvre' is also used for the French-style soft goat cheese. The hard Italian-style cheese is 'caprino' (from the Itaalian 'capra', or 'goat'). Although I personally eat a fair amount of the latter, I still just call it 'goat cheese'.
We do use 'mutton' for sheep meat, but I'm not aware of any separate term for goat meat. 'Mutton' is used for goat meat in the Carribean, but rarely outside the Caribbean.
The reason English uses a different name for the animal versus the meat boils down to social class differences after the Norman conquest of England. The Old English (Anglo-Saxon) speaking peasant class who raised the animals, and the Norman French speaking ruling class who simply ate the animals used their own terms for the animals. Since certain high-value animals were resevered primarlly for the Norman-French speaking aristocracy, those Norman terms for the animals gradually worked their way into English. Other animals were commonly eaten across all social classes, so they didn't develop seperate terms, or else were seen as peasant food and thus unworth of inclusion in Norman vocabulary.
Some Googling suggests that the term 'chevron' for goat meat wasn't introduced until 1922, as a marketing attempt by the National Sheep and Goat Raisers Association in Texas to make the meat sound more appealing and marketable. It never caught on, primarily because goat just isn't eaten that much by most Americans. The primary consumers of goats are immigrants from Latin America the Middle-East, and the Carribean where goat is more commonly consumed. Mutton isn't widely consumed either in the US, aside from being traditional on Easter. Its consumption is again relegated to certain ethnic groups, althoug it is fairly common in the southwestern US with certain Native America tribes of that region
So, due to the term 'chevron' being relatively new (linguistically speaking) in an uncommon market, it just hasn't entered the general vocabulary of most English speakers. Since it's so uncommon, it of course hasn't make the international jump to other English-speaking countries.
/novella
