Perhaps my tone was too harsh Cheerskep.
My point was merely that, so long as you restrict yourself to objects that
can be picked out deictically, you can of course find synonyms for words in
multiple languages (with the caveat that the objects 'exist' in that
culture; I don't think ancient Greek, for instance, has a word for cigar).
Things become complicated with less concrete things, but they can of course
be translated/communicated -- perhaps not with a direct synonym but with a
few extra words that function like a description. Moreover, I wanted to
point out that the loss of brevity can also amount to a loss of elegance, or
a loss of rigour, as the case might be. And in any case laguage is much
richer than nouns for things we smoke or wear.
On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 11:14 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Imago writes:
>
> "Cheerskep, you pick bad examples of linguistic overlap."
>
> I'm sorry Imago feels that way. My aim in this thread was, among other
> things, to deny the famous universal, "There are no synonyms."
>
> I clearly bungled my argument because both Imago and Geoff came away
> thinking
> they refute it by citing some (German) words for which everyone agrees
> there
> is indeed no English synonym.
>
> I offered 'und', 'Zigarre, 'Seife', 'Zahn', 'Schuh' for which I claimed a
> bilingual German-English speaker would give one-word translations ('and',
> 'cigar', 'soap', 'knife', 'shoe'). I'd hoped to employ the usual method of
> refuting a
> universal -- offering acceptable counter-examples. But mine were so
> unpersuasive, they were considered and dismissed without comment.
>
> When I supplied the following list of words, I evidently blew it again with
> Imago. I'd bent myself to convey that I was asking for the opposite of
> arguments why there are some synonyms there. I said I was asking for
> descriptions of
> insightful "nice distinctions" between them:
>
> gift
> talent
> aptitude
> skill
> capacity
> craft
>
> But I obviously screwed up my explanation of what I was after, or Imago
> would not have said, "Cheerskep, you pick bad examples of linguistic
> overlap."
>
> I confess I find all of this regrettable.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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