[Lexicog] Synonymy

[David Tuggy]

Synomyns are sprinkled on the foam of my Capuccino.

Seriously, you are right, though I prefer to say that if real synonyms
exist, they are a very rare limiting case. Some do get pretty close,
though I can't think of any at the moment ... Some abbreviations are
pretty close synonyms with their unabbreviated forms, for instance in
the organization I'm with, EC and Executive Committee. The same is less
clearly true, of course of other cases, such as UFO and Unidentified
Flying Object.

--David Tuggy

ps. A little girl I knew, when she was only three or four, invented a
knock-knock joke, in which the punch-line was

Cinnamon, you better repent!


Christopher Brewster wrote:

> Synomyns are used to justify making a distinction between 'words' and
> 'concepts'.
> Supposedly a given concept could be expressed by different synonyms.
>
> I work with ontologies so often I am obliged to fall in line in what I
> write.
> What I really feel is that there are only words which sometimes
> overlap in meaning to a greater or lesser extent.
>
> But real/complete synonyms whether within or across languages never
> exists.
>
> For some reason this position is incomprehensible to most people I
> work with.
>
> Christopher Brewster
>
>
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> A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of an
> idea within a wall of words.---  Samuel Butler
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>     *From:* Fritz Goerling [mailto:Fritz_Goerling at sil.org]
>     *Sent:* 12 April 2005 23:46
>     *To:* lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
>     *Subject:* RE: [Lexicog] Synonymy
>
>     It is my pet peeve as a Bible translation consultant when teams
>     answer to my question
>     about the meaning of two ""synonymous"" words "they mean the
>     same." I speak one
>     African language fluently and have no problem to convince speakers
>     of this language
>     that certain words do not mean the same, by generating examples in
>     which one
>     word has to be used over another. But this becomes a challenge in
>     other languages
>     which I do not know when the translators say "no, they are just
>     the same." What
>     usually helps is to use an example from a common language
>     (national or trade
>     language) which shows how so-called "synonyms" differ connotatively.
>
>     FWIW,
>     Fritz Goerling
>
>
>
>         Wayne wrote:
>
>               What kinds of experiences have you all had when trying
>         to elicit
>               synonyms
>               from speakers of a language?
>
>               Do you sometimes get a response something like, "Oh,
>         there is a
>               little
>               difference between those words," confirming what many
>         lexicographers
>               and
>               semanticians has claimed, that there are seldom true
>         synonyms in a
>               language?
>
>               Wayne
>               -----
>               Wayne Leman
>               Cheyenne website: http://www.geocities.com/cheyenne_language
>
>         I'd think more likely would be "no, they are just the same."
>         That's what I
>         might answer for English "own" and "possess", for example. But
>         then you
>         start investigating their actual usage, and you find that they
>         are not
>         completely substitutable for each other. Then the fun begins
>         to find out
>         why.
>
>         Mike Cahill
>
>
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