On Oct 18, 2008, at 3:21 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Here are some thoughts I claim we should keep in mind when we talk of
"synonyms". (And I'll just say all this quickly, without repeating
the reams of
supporting arguments for these views that I've posted in the past):
Words don't have "meanings".
I keep feeling tripped up by your constant hectoring on this point.
Surely, words have meanings, namely, the things occasioned in my mind.
Then it struck me as I read this sentence that you have been putting
the emPHASis on the wrong sylLABle, as the saying goes. You mean to
assert the notion that words do not HAVE meanings. A written or spoken
word does not possess something called "meaning," which, by some kind
of sensory mechanism and by means of encoding is emitted from my brain
and slipped into your neural pathways. What passes between us is the
encoded stuff; we both hope your decoder ring matches my encoder ring,
and the result in your head is largely congruent with what's in mine.
A bilingual German-English speaker would realize 'und' and 'and' are
from
different languages, but he is still liable to assert "they are
synonyms". They
are synonyms for him, but they aren't similar for an American who
has never
heard or seen a word of German, including 'und', in his life.
Well, this is a novel idea. I never thought of words from two
languages that specify (call to mind) the same referent as *synonyms*.
This strikes me as a contrived argument. I believe that it is
generally understood that two "synonyms" in a single language are
separate utterances that point to the same referent and that are
largely, but not perfectly, coincident. On the other hand, two words
from different languages that point to the same referent (even a
conjunction, i.e., a syntactical function) are called exact
translations. And this phenomenon of two words from different
languages that "mean" the same thing exemplifies your point that the
utterance doesn't have meaning, but that it provokes the meaning in
the listener--in this case, a good or reliable or perfect translation.
Reminds me of a story of a professor I knew in college. He was in the
process of translating a long history text from German into English.
He took a nap, woke up, and resumed translating the text into Greek
for a short while, until he realized his error.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
