Etymology of fruit names (the unusual formation of berry fruit names and the indigenous fruits of England)

Question

I am from Italy. Italy has a warmer climate than England, and some fruits that naturally grow in Italy (and maybe they do not naturally grow in England) have an English name that sounds a lot like the Italian one:

Italian	English
Pesca	Peach
Albicocca	Apricot
Limone	Lemon
Arancia	Orange
Pera	Pear
Prugna	Plum
Ciliegia	Cherry

On the other hand, all the "berries" (berry fruits) have very different names:

Italian	English
Fragola	Strawberry
Mirtillo	Blueberry
Mirtillo rosso	Cranberry
Lampone	Raspberry
Mora	Blackberry

Possibly, all the berries are indigenous to England.

It seems to me that the indigenous fruits have indigenous names while the imported fruits borrowed their names from outside.

Is this a sound argument? Or is it something else?

Answer 1

I hypothesize that the different forms for berry are a consequence of English and Germanic languages' tendency to form compounds at a higher rate, specifically with the word berry, a tendency that didn't make its way into Latin or Italian.

Berry comes from Germanic languages

Berry is a word inherited from Germanic (OED, "berry, n.1"). The full etymology uncovers cognates and predecessors in a number of Germanic languages:

Found, with some variety of form, in all the Germanic languages: with Old English bęrie weak feminine, compare Old Norse ber (Danish bær , Swedish bär ), Old Saxon beri (in wîn-beri ), Middle Dutch bēre , Old High German beri strong neuter, Middle High German ber and bere neuter and feminine, modern German beere feminine. These point to an Old German *bazjo-m , as a byform of *basjo-m , whence Gothic basi neuter (in weina-basi ‘grape’). The s type is also preserved in Middle Dutch beze , modern Dutch bes , also Middle Dutch and modern Dutch bezie feminine. The feminine forms Dutch bēzie and Old English berie answer to a Germanic extended form *basjôn- , *bazjôn- . The ulterior history is uncertain: *bazjo- has been conjecturally referred to *bazo-z bare adj., adv., and n., as if a bare or uncovered fruit, also to the root represented by Sanskrit bhas- to eat.

I understand the Italian word for berry to be bacca (Vocabolario Treccani), which comes from the Latin baca (Wiktionary). So berry and baca share a different point of origin at least a couple of thousand years back. Having a different origin doesn't have to result in a different form: plum comes through Germanic but retains an indirect relationship with the Latin pruna (OED, "plum, n. and adj.2"). But one tendency in Germanic does come into play in this case to produce forms distinct between English and Italian: forming words through compounds.

English and more specifically berry loves to form compounds

Latin, Italian, and English all have processes for forming words through compounds. However, only English formed many compounds out of the word berry. Latin did not form compounds for its different berries to connect berries morphologically. Instead, the Latin/Italian names each have different origins. For instance, mirtillo is related to a Greek word for myrtle, from Semitic (Wiktionary); mora is related to the Greek word for black mulberry or blackberry, whose form goes right back to proto-Indo-European (Wiktionary). Baca did not generate many compounds, including for any of the berries you list.

However, berry did generate several compounds in English, including at least one (strawberry) that doesn't appear in other Germanic languages. (German uses Erdbeere, Dutch aardbei, Danish jordbær, each compounding but not with a cognate of straw (Wiktionary).) English has many other berries as well: gooseberry, bilberry, mulberry, crowberry, barberry, bearberry, hag-berry, dingleberry, elderberry, and still others. The prevalence of the compound for berry in English is no surprise; linguist Ingo Plag commented that compounding is "the most productive type of word-formation process in English" (Word-Formation in English, p. 131; Google Books). While Latin occasionally deigns to form compounds, English does it all the time, from Old English onward. So do other Germanic languages. To use Dutch alongside English using the chart from the question, you can see the general tendency to using a compound form in a Germanic language:

Dutch	English
Aardbei	Strawberry
Bosbes	Blueberry
Veenbes	Cranberry
Framboos	Raspberry
Braambes (Braam)	Blackberry

So you can see at least a linguistic tendency in English to form compounds with berry that is absent in Italian.¹ In the last section, I'll consider the geographic implications of the question: is this about the difference between fruit availability in southern and northern Europe?

Considering the geography hypothesis again

Your guess is that indigenous plants in England would share an English or Germanic origin, whereas plants introduced to England would share a Latin origin. That is possible, especially with lemon, orange, apricot, and peach, and possibly with other fruits.

There are exceptions. Mulberry shows that a fruit from outside England can be adopted as a berry anyway. Varieties of the mulberry tree (Latin morum, Italian gelso) have origins in South Asia and are widely grown in southern Europe, northern Africa, the Middle East, and India (Wikipedia). Mulberries perhaps came to England during the Roman period (Morus Londinium). Old English did have a word, more, used to refer to a mulberry tree ("more, n.2"). However, mulberry occurs in English by the 14th century anyway and replaces more; the mul- in mulberry probably comes from Latin morum, but now as a compound with berry (OED, "mulberry, n. and adj."). So English could take a very old fruit by another name and berry it.

Mulberry could be compared to pear, which was also an import whose name comes from Latin. Where more was entirely replaced by mulberry, pear has remained relatively stable in form. Perhaps berry specifically tends to form compounds for anything that is a berry or berry-like, whereas the compound options for non-berry fruit are more limited (e.g., pearfruit, which is occasionally used to differentiate fruit from tree but does not replace pear).

So I can't completely answer the geographical question, but I would guess that berry being particularly prone to compounding in English explains at least part of the difference in forms. That makes the geography hypothesis harder to test.

¹ Beyond the scope of this answer are other food compounds. For instance, does nut behave similarly to berry? Hazelnut is nocciola in Italian. Walnut is simply noce or nut. Chestnut is castagno/a. If someone wanted to do a more complete study of food geography and etymology, I would recommend looking at other compounds.

Answer 2

In English, many berry words can be explained with a linguistic phenomenon called a "cranberry morpheme" in morphology where a bound morpheme or a word element (like in the archetypal example: the cran- of cranberry) cannot be assigned a meaning nor a grammatical function. Although, it is not always the case as in blueberry and blackberry where the first element is straightforward. The more unusual berry words with cranberry morphemes are mainly the product of remodeling of foreign words to make them easier to spell and pronounce in English (called anglicization in linguistics) and they tend to have folk etymologies. The book For the Love of Language An Introduction to Linguistics (By Kate Burridge, Tonya N. Stebbins · 2019) explains in detail as below:

 Crans and huckles - more bound morphemes

Consider the following list of berry words and decide where you might put the morpheme boundaries: blackberry, blueberry, cranberry, boysenberry, loganberry, goose- berry, strawberry, raspberry.

Presumably, you want to identify a berry morpheme here. There is no problem in blackberry and blueberry, but what do you do with boysen, cran and logan, which in isolation have no meaning? These are examples of special bound morphemes (appropriately dubbed 'cranberry morphemes' or 'cranmorphs'). History can usually shed some light. Cranberry derives from the name for the bird, though no one is entirely sure why this fruit is linked to cranes. Less of a problem is boysen. True, it's also only meaningful in combination with berry, yet its link to the American horticulturist Rudolph Boysen is clear - he developed this hybrid in the 1920s. Similarly, it was Mr Logan who inspired the loganberry.

At first blush, gooseberry doesn't look problematic, since it appears to be a straightforward compound of goose + berry. The question is why goose? Are these birds great consumers of berries, or did people choose the name because the rough surface of the berry reminded them of prickly gooseflesh? Researchers have uncovered earlier versions of the word: groser and gozell. These don't look much like goose at all and probably came from the French word for the berry groseille. English speakers are well known for remodelling foreign imports to look like English words and must have changed groseille berry into the more linguistically friendly gooseberry - the justification would have been the bristly goose-bump textured surface of the berry.

So, what about the straw in the strawberry? Straw is the name we give to the stalks of threshed crops, something we once used to strew on the floor (and the word is related to strew 'to spread or scatter'). One suggestion then for the origin of strawberry is that the long trailing runners of the strawberry plant reminded people of pieces of straw on the floor. You could think of the word as 'strewnberry'. Another possibility is that it is a remodelled form of strayberry - after all, the runners do stray. Straw was also once used to protect strawberries, yet the wild fruit was called strawberry well before it was propagated in gardens. Then again, wild strawberries grow in grassy places and in hay fields, and their external seeds look like straw. There seems no end to the possible suggestions! In fact strawberry may well be the result of a combination of these ideas - a kind of lexical bitser, with multiple origins.

The difficulty is deciding how much history should inform our morpheme boundaries. Consider the raspberry. Those of you who have picked raspberries and been scratched by their thorns are probably tempted to make a connection with the verb rasp 'to grate', and would analyse this as a straightforward compound. However, no connection with rasp has ever been established. This task of carving up berry words into morphemes proves difficult. And we haven't even started on bilberries, huckleberries, hurtleberries and whortleberries! Most berry words aren't nearly as obliging as the blackberry or blueberry.

Small round juicy fruits similar in size tend to have a compound name with the second element "berry". Etymonline says that berry and apple are the only native fruit names; and that's why they may have used as generic terms to form fruit names. Etymonline provides the note below for apple (n.):

In Middle English and as late as 17c., it was a generic term for all fruit other than berries but including nuts (such as Old English fingeræppla "dates," literally "finger-apples;" Middle English appel of paradis "banana," c. 1400). Hence its grafting onto the unnamed "fruit of the forbidden tree" in Genesis.

If you delve into the etymology of different fruit names, you may find that they are influenced by the language of the lands where they were brought to Europe or England from also; as in apricot, where the word was influenced by Arabic and Spanish. Here is a relevant etymological explanation of apricot from cs.mcgill.com:

The name derives from "apricock" and "abrecox", through the French abricot, from the Spanish albaricoque, which was an adaptation of the Arabic al-burquk, itself a rendering of the late Greek πρεκοκκια or πραικοκιον, adapted from the Latin praecox or praecoquus, early, possibly referring to the fruit maturing much earlier in the summer than plums. However, in Argentina and Chile the word for "apricot" is "damasco" which probably indicates that to the Argentines the fruit was associated with Damascus.

The apricot originated in northeastern China near the Russian border, not in Armenia as the scientific name suggests. It did arrive in Armenia after moving through central Asia, which took about 3,000 years. The Romans brought it into Europe through Anatolia about 70 BC. While English settlers brought the apricot to the English colonies in the New World, most of modern American production of apricots comes from the seedlings carried to the west coast by Spanish missionaries

Answer 3

All of the fruit you mention have their own etymology. There seems to be no overall rhyme or reason for their current use other than popular convenience.

Blueberry did not appear in English until the late 16th century and was then used as a generic name for any bush that grew blue berries.

Strawberry appears in English c. 1000 AD, and is given by the OED as “etymology uncertain” (there’s a conjecture that the “straw” refers to the achenes being like small pieces of straw.)

Raspberry comes from “raspwood/rasp” which was the original name of unknown origin and which dates from the mid-16th century (It is weakly conjectured that it is from the Middle French noun “rasp” – the carpenter’s tool - in reference to the roughness of the small thorns on the stem)

Cranberry is even more recent and from the 17th century. Prior to this the plant was not specifically identified and all bushes of a similar type went under names relating more to where it appeared with suich names as marsh-whorts , fen-whorts , fen-berries , marsh-berries , moss-berries. Cranberry first arose in the American colonies where it is native and is an anglicisation of the Low German “krônbere”

Blackberry is Old English. Its name has survived as it was so common and so edible.

Cherry appears in Old English c. 1000 AD as cyrs, ciris and according to the OED:

Classical Latin had cerasus cherry-tree, cerasum cherry, corresponding to Greek κερασός (also κερασέα, κερασίο) cherry-tree, κεράσιον cherry; according to the Roman writers, so called because brought by Lucullus from Cerasus in Pontus (though some refer the Greek to κέρας, horn). Latin *Ceresea, to which the Romanic and Germanic names alike go back.