The preceding writeup is missing the distinction between
synchronic and
diachronic explanations. Linguists know the
etymology of most or all these words: they know where the element 'cran'
came from, but that's not the same as what it
means now.
Almost all berry names in English have meaningless first elements: cran, huckle, whortle, bil, boysen, logan, tay, /ra:z/ in raspberry, /gUz/ in gooseberry, and even 'straw' in strawberry. None of those is an obvious element the way we have in blackcurrant or oakapple. Unless you look up the dictionary to find their etymologies (and probably all of them have known etymologies), then any guessing you do as to why it's called that is unreliable folk etymology.
What have strawberries got to do with straw? Were they traditionally grown in straw? I look up my dictionary now and find it's possibly from a resemblance of the stalks. Hmmm.
There are numerous meanings of 'bill' but none obviously give rise to an explanation of 'bill-berry'. The spelling bilberry suggests there's something else going on. I could look up the dictionary again...
There's a cran that's a measure of herrings but I can't see how that helps.
The /ra:z/ of raspberry and the /gUz/ of gooseberry don't mean anything at all, but the spelling gives us a clue. Though, admittedly, not a huge one. If raazberries are actually rasp-berries, it's because they're, um... rough like a rasp? And a goose-berry... hmm... But if they didn't retain archaic spellings, we wouldn't even have those clues to meaning.
Now I happen to be fairly sure that loganberries are named after someone called Logan, and boysenberries after one Boysen; and there's a place in Scotland called Tay so perhaps that's where the tayberry was created; but the point remains that, however well we know their origins, all the initial morphemes are meaningless in synchronic terms. This is what the concept of 'cranberry morpheme' is about. Any native speaker recognizes the 'berry' part, and all the parts in redcurrant and blackcurrant, and understands how they're put together. But the cranberry morphemes don't have any clear meaning of their own, unless you delve into their histories.
The previous noder has now replied, but the only point they might have successfully made is that Aronoff made a mistake when coining the word. Possibly this is true. Though...
The cran of cranberry is often called a cranberry morpheme. Originally, the term referred to a morph which occurs uniquely in only one word (such as cranberry, though this word is not quite so unique after the invention of cranapple juice). However, the crucial property of such an element is that it can’t be assigned a meaning of its own.
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~spena/372/372_ch3.htm
The rest of the matter the noder quotes correctly illustrates the (current) use of the term, without suggesting that any error has been made, or that etymology is pertinent.
Cranberry. Also craneberry.
app. from some LG. source; cf. G. kranichbeere, kranbeere, LG. krônbere, kranebere, etc. (all meaning craneberry).
- from The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,
1933, 3rd ed. 1944
Crane, a bird.
...
cranberry, (Low G.) Modern; from Low G. kraanbeere (Berghaus), G. kranbeere, lit. craneberry ; cf. Dan. tranebær (from trane = krane, as above); Swed. tranbär.
- from W.W. Skeat,
Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language,
Oxford, 1887, new ed. 1911
'as above' refers to the same change k > t in Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic for crane the bird.
I think that disposes of the possibility that linguists weren't aware of the
etymology of '
cranberry'. The OED and Skeat are the two standard works. Aronoff must have been dead embarrassed if he did overlook it; though I really have to doubt whether
he was the one who misunderstood. But the etymology isn't relevant.
Native speakers don't have etymology in their heads: it's not part of their
competence. This isn't an argument from personal ignorance, because 'competence' is a technical term in
linguistics, the structured knowledge that all speakers have of how to make well-formed utterances. The history of a word doesn't come into it at all.
A morpheme is a meaningful element that can be used to make words: so un and break and able in unbreakable. A bound morpheme is one that can't exist as a word on its own, like un- and -ness. There's a word ness meaning a cape or headland, but it's a different morpheme from -ness the suffix; their meanings are quite different. A productive morpheme is one that can be used to make new words: un- and -ness, for example. We know what they mean, so we know what a new word containing them would mean.
Words perceive, receive, conceive and permit, remit, commit are unusual in that they clearly form a pattern and are internally divisible, but the bound morphemes -ceive and -mit have no assignable meaning in English. The native speaker of English can't extract, hasn't got it in their competence to extract, a common element for forming new related words.
This has nothing to do with etymology. No-one can imagine that linguists don't know the familiar Latin words these come from. Their separate meaning is quite straightforward in Latin. But English speakers aren't Latin speakers. This isn't personal ignorance, it's the internal nature of the language faculty.
The morpheme cran- in cranberry is like -ceive but occurs in only one word. So too are logan, tay and the rest. It doesn't occur in crank or cranium, and it also doesn't occur in crane or cranage. The word crane isn't composed of cran plus some extra bit that changes its pronunciation. In a native speaker's competence, they aren't related at all.
Actually a gooseberry morpheme is even more interesting. The phonetic chunk /gUz/ not only doesn't occur in any other word, the syllable doesn't fit the sound pattern of English (except in the North of England, where buzz and does rhyme with it). There are no words like /gUz/, /gUv/, /gUð/ with the short vowel of 'look' and a voiced fricative.
The reason cran- and /gUz/ are noticeable as morphs is that we can separate off the known element /bri/ (or /b@ri/ or /beri/) as berry. There are other words like breakfast, shepherd, and cupboard where the spelling tells us their history as two morphs, but synchronically they are as indivisible as curtain or haggard.