cranberries - was: kahomni

["Alfred W. Tüting"]

Here's my two cents to this issue (mainly in German):

Cranberry - German: Kranbeere, also Kränbeere, per. reg. 'Preisselbeere
(< 14. Jh.) 'Kranichsbeere' (lit.: crane berry), initially for 'Moosbeere'.

'Kranich' m. (crane) (< 8. Jh.) Mhd. kranech(e), kranch(e), ahd. kranuh,
kranih, from wg. *kranuka- m. 'Kranich', also in ae. cornoc. Without the
suffix s. Kran, mhd- Kran(e), ahd. krano, as. krano, ae. cran
(*crana-lon), mhd. kruon, mndd. kran, kron. Outside of the germanic
languages, there's no common base although the words are comparable
pretty well:
gr. géranos, f./(m.), kymr. garan, (gall. -garanos), lit. garanys
(Reiher, Storch/heron, stork), arm. krunk (with k-extension), lat. grus
(with u-extension), lit. gérve f., russ-kslav. zeravi. Maybe, it's
onomatopoeic, though this assumption only seems to match with the Latin,
as the cry of a crane could be given as [gruu]. Maybe these are
Vriddhi-formings (cf. Gauch).
In Old Norse, the crane is 'trani' maybe a variant of the same word.

(Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, de Gruyter 1995)



Alfred