Sunday, October 25, 2020

Berry Fruit Compounds

Many compounds describe berries. Red currants and black currants are also berries, though they do not have the word berry in their name. Here is a list of different berries:

  • blackberry
  • blueberry
  • boysenberry
  • cranberry
  • elderberry
  • gooseberry
  • lingonberry
  • loganberry
  • raspberry
  • strawberry
The blackberry and blueberry are identified by their colour. The words elderberry, gooseberry and strawberry are not identified by colour, but they consist of free morphemes. This does not appear to be the case with cranberry, but the morpheme cran is derived from crane. 

The boysenberry, a hybrid of the blackberry and the raspberry, was bred by Charles Boysen. Another hybrid, the loganberry, was bred by James Harvey Logan. It is also a hybrid of the blackberry and the raspberry. Both fruits have the characteristics of blackberries and raspberries. However, loganberries taste more similar to raspberries than do boysenberries.

The lingonberry is similar to the cranberry but is smaller in size. The morpheme lingon is the word for lingonberry in Swedish. Another berry is the raspberry, but the origin of the morpheme rasp is unclear. It might come from the Old English word rasp, which means rough.

The names of many berries are compound nouns in English. Certain names have clear origins such as blackberry, blueberry and strawberry. In the case of raspberry, the origin is not clear.



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