2802: What’s the Matter with the Matterhorn? Aug 22, 2024

The famous Swiss mountain, known in English and German as the Matterhorn, is known by a very different looking name in French and Italian, that being Cervin and Cervino respectively. There are numerous reasons how it got to be as famous as it is, one of which being its distinctive shape with a very narrow base and sharp point. 

You might think, especially given this shape, that the horn of Matterhorn and the cervo (‘deer’ in Italian) in Cervino would be relevant, but that’s not exactly true. What is true is that ‘Matterhorn’ is a combination of “matter + horn” meaning “meadow-peak”, but this is not specifically related to a horn like an animal—though this is where the English ‘horn’ came from many centuries prior to this. In the case of Cervin(o), it is even less related, having previously been from the French ‘servin’, from the Latin “(mōns) silvanus” or “wooded (mountain)”. This S was changed to a C by Horace Bénédict deSaussure—not to be confused with the linguist, father of semiotics, Ferdinand de Saussure— who mistook the name to be related to the French ‘cerf’ (deer), and by extension Italian ‘cervo’.