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that the person had been
standing before sitting, while سﻮ ﻠﺠﻟا means that he had
been lying down before he straightened his position to that of sitting. Those
linguists were trying to establish that there is no absolute synonymy.
Other Arab linguists believed in the existence of complete synonymy in
Arabic; Ibn khalaweh, Alfairouz Abadi. They recognized some benefits of
synonymy as a language phenomenon:
1.
The multiplicity of words and methods in order
to enable us to express
ourselves. That is, in case we forgot a certain word, or it was difficult to
pronounce a sound in the word we need, we tend to use its synonym. It is said
that a wise old man called Wasel Ibn Ataa had never
been heard saying a word
that has the sound /r/, because he was not able to pronounce the /r/ sound, so he
used other words as synonyms all his life;
2.
Synonyms help in eloquence and rhythm;
3.
There are certain words in Arabic that have many synonyms in a way
that one can not deny the existence of synonymy. For instance, all the names of
Allah have some very close synonyms therewith – Magestic, Glorious,
Praiseworthy, Beneficient, Bountiful, etc.
There are many factors that brought synonymy to Arabic, some of them
are:
1.
There are
different dialects of Arabic, so the same object or concept
has different names, and when those dialects came to touch with each other and
the new standard Arabic came into existence, it preserved such names and
words.
2.
The concept or the object
has only one name originally, then and
through time people described it using different adjectives which in turn became
established terms or words for that object, and people used them as synonyms.
3.
Borrowing from foreign languages.
It is obvious that the first group of linguists refused to recognize the
existence of synonymy in Arabic, while the second
group said that synonymy
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does exist in Arabic, they did not distinguish different types of synonymy, but
recognized only absolute synonymy.
The author concludes that we can explain some of the differences in the
meaning of synonyms according to the context in which the words are used, but
we do not have all explanations, the matter that
tells us that synonymy is a
natural old linguistic phenomenon.
Concepts “naturally signify” what they are concepts of, this “natural
signification” is thought of as a kind of representation relation, based on the fact
that concepts are in some way “naturally similar” to their objects. This
arrangement provides an account of synonymy and equivocation in spoken and
written language. Two terms (whether from the same or different spoken/written
languages) are
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