Cranberry morpheme

In linguistic morphology, a cranberry morpheme (also called unique morpheme or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned an independent meaning or grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from another.^[1]

Etymology[]

The archetypal example is the cran of cranberry. Unrelated to the homonym cran with the meaning "a case of herrings", this cran actually comes from crane (the bird), although the connection is not immediately evident. Similarly, mul exists only in mulberry (mul is from Latin morus, the mulberry tree). Phonetically, the first morpheme of raspberry also counts as a cranberry morpheme, even though the word "rasp" does occur by itself. Compare these with blackberry, which has two obvious unbound morphemes, and to loganberry and boysenberry, whose first morphemes are derived from personal names.

Examples[]

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Other cranberry morphemes in English include:

• cob in cobweb, from the obsolete word coppe for a spider.
• Many elements in English toponyms, such as "-ing" ("Reading," "Dorking," "Washington") from an Old English term meaning "the people of." (Note, however, that the "-ing" at the end of words such as "reading", the verb, is not a cranberry morpheme, as it is an affixed morpheme.)

Emergence[]

Cranberry morphemes can arise in several ways:

• A dialectal word can become part of the standard language in a compound, but not in its root form: e.g. blatherskite, "one who talks nonsense", as Scots has the word skite meaning "contemptible person".
• A word can become obsolete in its root form but remain current in a compound: e.g. lukewarm from Middle English luke "tepid".
• A compound loanword may have a recognisable native cognate for one element but not the other: e.g. hinterland is from German hinter "behind" and land "land".
• A loanword may have one part misanalysed to a false cognate: e.g. a taffrail is a type of rail, but the word comes from Dutch tafereel "carved panel".

See also[]

Look up cranberry, mulberry, gooseberry, raspberry, or blackberry in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Appendix:Orphaned words
• Fossil word
• Unpaired word – words like "unkempt", "ruthless"

References[]