From Golden Delicious to Cabernet Carbon: An Analysis of Naming Strategies in Fruit and Berry Cultivation

Abstract

This article investigates fruit- and berry-related naming practices in horticulture and viticulture from ethnolinguistic, phraseological, and onomasiological perspectives, focusing on English and German. The study examines how cultivar names encode sensory qualities, symbolic meanings, and culturally conditioned value systems, and how these elements interact with market-oriented strategies of nomination. Drawing on selected case studies of apple cultivars in English and German and fungus-resistant grape varieties developed in German-speaking regions, the analysis demonstrates that epithet-based and prestige-oriented naming models play a central role in shaping consumer perception. The findings show that fruit- and berry-related names reflect not only practical considerations of cultivation and breeding but also deeper metaphorical, sensory, and ethnocultural associations. The qualitative onomasiological analysis is complemented by a corpus-based investigation, which provides empirical evidence for regional variation in cultivar name usage and for the evaluative adjectives most frequently associated with selected variety names.