[Lexicog] Law of Synonyms

[William Poser]

Ron Moe wrote:
>I believe the correct claim concerning 'synonyms' is
>that there are no exact synonyms. For two words to be
>exact synonyms they would have to be interchangeable
>in any and all contexts with no change in meaning or
>any other aspect of usage.

This is a little too strong, I think. As I understand it,
what is usually meant by saying that two words are
synonyms is that they have the same truth conditions.
They may have different connotations, and they may belong
to different stylistic registers. 

My impression is that it is quite possible to have true
synonyms if we relax the requirement that they belong to the
same register. Japanese provides many examples, since
there are thousands of meanings for which there is both a native
Japanese word and a word borrowed from Chinese. The Chinese loans
are usually higher in stylistic register, though not always,
but I don't think that, in general, there is any difference in
connotation, much less in truth-conditional meaning. Some are
even indistinguishable in writing. "sonjin" and "murabito",
the Sino-Japanese and native words for "villager", are written
the same way and are completely interchangable except for the
fact that sonjin is more high-fallutin, murabito more colloquial. 

Indeed, at least in literary languages, I think that
there can be true synonyms within a register.
An example comes from Sanskrit, which has a bazillion
words for "king", e.g. raj-, rajan-, maharajan, ishvara,
maheshvara, and bhumipati (off the top of my head, in crude
ascii transliteration). The first two are different stem forms
of the same root. "ishvara" is historically "lord", "maheshvara"
"great lord", bhumipati "lord of the big female thing (=earth)".
In spite of the different etymologies, which in some cases may give
rise to different connotations, my Sanskrit teacher, and others
whom I have consulted, all agree that in Epic and Classical Sanskrit
they mean exactly the same thing in a truth-conditional sense.
A "maheshvara" does not rule a larger or more important territory
than an "ishvara". Moreover, these words belong to the same
register. In poetry the choice is often determined by the
metre.

Bill


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