usage - Why is mutton used for both sheep meat and goat meat?

The meat of an adult sheep is called mutton.

The meat of an adult goat is called chevon or mutton.

In the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean, and in some parts of Asia, particularly Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, the word “mutton” is often used to describe both goat and sheep meat, despite its more specific meaning (limited to the meat of adult sheep) in the UK, US, Australia and several other English speaking countries.
_{Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat_meat}

---

Questions:

• Why mutton is used for goat meat in some Asian countries (and Caribbean)? Is this a semantic extension? What is the origin of this usage?


• Is mutton ever used for goat meat in North America?


• What word is common for goat meat in North America? For example: "goat meat" or "chevon"? (You can talk about UK, NZ, AU etc. also)

(Though, goat meat itself is not that common in North America comparing to other parts of the world)

Answer

My answer addresses the questions What word is common for goat meat in North America? For example: "goat meat" or "chevon"? More precisely, it focuses on the question How common is the term chevon for goat meat in North America, and when and where did that term arise?

North American familiarity with the term chevon as a synonym for "goat meat" is easy to overstate. I had never heard of the term before reading this question, and the word does no appear in any Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, including the most recent edition—the Eleventh (2003).

Merriam-Webster Online does include an entry for it, as follows:

chevon : the flesh of the goat used as food

but, disappointingly, the online dictionary doesn't provide a first known use date for chevon in English.

A Google Books search for chevon for the years 1700–1927 turned up no references to the word in connection with goat meat (in English-language texts, anyway), though it did fetch several references to chevon as another name for the chub (Cyprinus cephalus, a freshwater fish related to carp), numerous references to the surname CheVon, and a considerable number of typos for chevron. (I observe that EL&U's automatic spelling checker considers chevon a typo, too.)

To solve the mystery of chevon, you must look at the Google Books search matches for 1928: According to the Agronomy Journal, volume 20 (1928), chevon is a portmanteau word invented by "commercial agencies" and promoted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture [combined snippets]:

How does it come that, "No warrant for dismembering words and using certain of their letters in creating other words exists?" The term "chevon," as a name for goat meat was created by "dismembering" chevre (French for goat) and mouton (French for mutton) and "using certain of the letters." It was devised by commercial agencies and appears in a recent publication of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Farmers' Bulletin 1203:19, revised 1926). It is by no means the only instance of its kind.

And from Otis W. Barrett, The Tropical Crops (1928), we have this comment [combined snippets]:

Chevon, the new official name of goat meat, is a very satisfactory source of animal protein; it is the cheapest meat available in both tropics. The common prejudice of the upper class against chevon is due largely to the odor of the old males, but when slaughtered before the age of five months there is practically no "taint" whatever, and if desexed (preferably by the simple modern vasocclusion method) the males may be allowed to reach full size.

To judge from this Ngram chart ("from the corpus American English") of "goat meat" (blue line) vs. "chevon" (red line) vs. "cabrito" (green line) vs. "kid meat" (yellow line) for the period 1800–2000, the initial promotional effort on behalf of chevon subsided rather quickly as the Depression progressed, and the meat-eating public didn't embrace the term:

In California (where I pursue a far from gourmet lifestyle), I am familiar with cabrito (meat from a young goat) from Mexican restaurants, but I've never knowingly encountered chevon. As for mutton, I imagine that when I've seen it mentioned on a menu, I've just assumed that the offering was meat from an adult sheep.