Cars have wheels; words do not have meaning (until our minds sense their
use). Yes, let's remember that we each make our own meanings. We're unlikely
to get into difficulty as to whether we infer the same from "too" as from
"and". However, other concepts/notions may be more tricky.
Geoff C
From: Michael Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: "Synonyms"
Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2007 15:52:35 -0400
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]
