Cranberry morpheme
In linguistic morphology a cranberry morpheme is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned an independent meaning and grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from another.
Etymology
The eponymous 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, although the connection is not immediately evident. Similarly, mul exists only in mulberry. 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, both of which have first morphemes derived from surnames.Examples
Other cranberry morphemes in English include:cob in cobweb, from the obsolete word .- Many elements in English toponyms, such as "-ing" from an Old English term meaning "the people of..." or "belonging to..." dew in dewlap, assuming that the particle popularly associated with literal dew is folk etymology and not lost.Were in werewolf
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, as Scots has the word '.
- A word can become obsolete in its root form but remain current in a compound: e.g. lukewarm from Middle English luke.
- A compound loanword may have a recognisable native cognate for one element but not the other: e.g. hinterland is from German hinter + 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 '.