the -berry suffix

[Lady Ten]

I have no idea what this one is supposed to mean.

However, before we get into a discussion about what it could indicate, let's take a look at the word itself. What is a berry? Some small fruit, such as a strawberry, blueberry, or blackberry? But wild strawberries belong to the rose family, whereas blueberries are a whole different biological category, and technically, if you define a berry as a small edible fruit, then grapes and small tomatoes are also berries.

By a stricter, more scientific botanical definition, a berry is any kind of simple fruit having seeds and pulp produced from a single ovary, which can include a whole range of things including avocados and bananas. Moving toward a more vernacular usage of the word, a berry can anything that pretty much looks like a grape, such as a cherry or hackberry or olive, even though those are drupes (stone fruits). In sum, the word "berry" itself is kind of vague and arbitrary. Before you can decide what this suffix would imply, you first have to figure out what the cats would even use it to refer to.

[Grey]

You're exactly right about all that, although my knowledge is more oriented around succulents than countryside fruit-producing plants, ehehehe.

Cats have a limited botanical knowledge, I expect. They are unlikely to differentiate between families of plants or classify them as we do. That said, I'm certain they would recognise the similarities between types of plants, and I'm equally as sure that they would have a name for each type of plant within their territory.

I have seen some people argue that the clans, as they are cats, would not differentiate between types of plants or have names for them (therefore should not use plants in characters' names) because why would they? They're cats, they don't eat plants*.

Plants are useful to the cats because they provide shelter and act as medicine. More importantly, though, plants are the main landmarks in almost every clan territory. It's very important to be able to tell the difference between an oak tree and an elm tree, because if you can't, you're going to get lost very often. And if there were no individual names for types of plant, what do you do when you're trying to organise a patrol? You can't exactly tell them to go to "that one tree" and then head to "that other tree" and along the creek and back to "that shrub".

To suggest that the cats couldn't tell the difference between the types of trees is pretty insulting to the cats' intelligence, really. Each plant is so incredibly different - by size, colour, leaf shape, and a multitude of other factors. These cats spend their whole lives around them. I think they'd know these plants far better than most people.

Sorry for the tangent, Ten, I just really wanted to say all that.

Totally on topic now:

As I said, cats should be able to determine the differences between plants, but lack the classification process that we use in our sciences. My guess is that "berry" in the cat vernacular would be any small soft-fleshed fruit, such as a blackberry or wild strawberry. I do believe that berry would be just a generic term, and that they would have individual names for these fruits as we do.

Larger fruits aren't common outside of human-kept orchards, with one of the largest (in England) being the highly distinctive apple and crabapple - which have their own name, as you can see, to distinguish them. (As a piece of trivia, an 'apple' was the word for any unknown or unusual type of fruit in a lot of Greek mythology).

I don't know about a suffix - I can't see any purpose for it - but as a prefix, berry- doesn't fly with me. If it's a generic term for any small fruit, it has too many visual connotations.