history synonym

history synonym

Exploring the Evolution of Synonyms in the English Language

1. Introduction to Synonyms and Their Importance

Monotony within a writer’s work can arise from a first reason of not applying synonyms. They provide a basic skill that all students, for whom English is not their first language, and established writers cannot only discuss the same issue or event in various ways but also keep audiences interested and engaged with their content. Since many learners may prefer to use simpler words instead of ones they do not directly use, synonyms are especially important. If that was not enough, synonyms might even introduce young students to the idea of idioms. Given these considerable benefits, it is overwhelmingly long-known subsequent utility within human-computer connection research to allow synthetic speech technology to reach its full communicating potential.

Synonyms are a valuable part of the diversity and richness expressed in the English language. They also serve an important role in the improvement of basic literacy skills. More than just simply being a way to emphasize or enhance communication and grace, synonyms also assist us in articulating the exact meaning of a given word or its message clarity. They are important tools that allow writers to make their narrative expression more interesting and enjoyable for their readers. And for the latter, using synonyms assists in expanding their vocabulary, making it fun and enjoyable to learn. For those whose English is their second language, synonyms are also helpful for serving as a confident bridge between what students already learn or know and new words they may come across in academic literature.

2. Historical Development of Synonyms in the English Language

A much better-known attempt to classify synonyms is the WordNet of Miller et al. Forensic has the senses “used in law, or connected with the administration of the law” and “belonging to a court of law, including judges, lawyers, etc.” The semantic classes exhibit a significant degree of conceptual plentitude. However, there is conceptual redundancy in the lists. For example, forensic has three classes of synonyms allegedly used in law as a sense of near synonymy. The second sense has nine synonyms, and five are “connected with the administration of the law.” This classification is simply too detailed.

One effort at a classification of synonyms is “The Denotational Structure of Synonyms in English” by Cote and Marshall (1978). This remarkable work applies a hierarchical specification of meaning derived from relations, allowing a transformation of expressions modeled in set-theoretic terms.

Roget’s Thesaurus, or Treasury of Compendious Knowledge, is one of the most frequently reprinted books in the English-language world. However, the system of nearly eight hundred classes is idiosyncratic, leading some to question the depth of word organization or even the accumulation of synonyms. The meanings of members within a Roget class are unlike, not directly obtained from the class title, and the member words may differ from the class topic.

Wilkins’ 1668 essay, “Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language,” used a semi-combinatorial classification. Synonymous words were classified into twelve categories: schema, genus, difference, property, relation, action, patient, agent, instruments, figure, place, and time. Words of the same class contained reversed sequences of symbols. For example, criminals are all the words expressive. Today, we would call these words antonyms or antonymous words, using a more generalized label.

3. Influence of Latin and Greek on Synonyms

There is relatively little that is Latin in English that is not Greek. Important exceptions are the chief terms for the objects of the new civilization which Latin had conquered and on which it was to impress its stamp. The contribution of Latin civilization to our language exhibits mainly the terms which are necessary for the life of that civilization – architectural, legal, medical, and military terms. There is, therefore, nothing strange in the fact of a substantial Greek element in all these words. At the same time, it is noteworthy that this contribution is confined to what can be designated an exterior or social civilization. Greek has bequeathed to English civilization all that is considered to be of cultural value.

In the early times of the English language, when scholars, theologians, and indeed all the learned were clerics, Latin was in constant and daily use. It was the language of all manuscripts, the learned tongue of all Western civilization. Most of the terms of medieval thought were Latin. The Latins styled the objects of the Hellenes, whereas the Hellenes themselves had different names for them. In the same way that they called the god of the Hellenes Zeus, they called their motherland Graecia and the people of their own race whom they conquered Graeci. In the matter of their own language, the Hellenes accepted the name of the Latins; among themselves, they called Latium by another appellation. Early English and Latin have in common, yet the wells of English seldom run deep enough to share in the sources of the streaming of Latin.

4. Modern Trends and Changes in Synonym Usage

The search for modern thesauri is also relatively disappointing. The Collins Thesaurus (2002), the Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition (2005), and the American Heritage Thesaurus (published by Houghton Mifflin Company) were found and consulted. Additionally, the American Heritage Thesaurus was consulted since I have learned a lot about it from Nieves-Espert, Morales, and Moreno. In terms of pure word-list, this is far from a complete collection of synonyms. Even though the long hours used to build and proof other tables, such as grid position and definition attributes, can only be considered proof-of-concept due to the huge gaps found in the published resources. To facilitate the critical use of sources when comparing the listing of several synonyms, a comparison of the synonyms output by several individual resources was produced. This shows combinations of sources and subsets of words where only one resource produced a synonymous word parameter.

Up to this section, we have discussed several topics related to synonyms, most of which are books published more than twenty years ago. Although the realization of this is, by some part, a result of the period researched, it is more due to the inability to find relatively current works on synonyms. To the best of my knowledge, there are no tools currently exploited in this area, like corpora or word properties (polysemy), statistical measurements for word behavior, and advances in these tools. The generation of better text corpora has caused a complete leakage of synonyms (which are the main object of this work) in the current state of the language. Even other properties, such as synonym discrimination and grid position, have been shown to have a direct impact on NLP tasks, and both are properties which synonyms have in common. The almost complete ignorance about these properties is a clear indication that our knowledge about synonyms is limited, outdated, and does not represent the current behavior of this complex part of the English language.

5. Conclusion: The Significance of Synonyms in Language Evolution

Historical linguistics attempts to understand language change and evolution, and it is known that new synonyms are often formed in languages via various linguistic phenomena such as borrowing, blending together changing wording, expressing variation, metaphor, metonymy, neologism, and the worst-case scenario. According to the word-formational principles discovered in the paper, we construct the synonymous vocabulary for Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English, from English-English lexicons and also from English-to-xxxx bilingual dictionaries. The power of English-English dictionaries lies in the semantics, which is often richer than that found in definitions, and a robust structure that supports rich and detailed semantic linking. These attributes promote the creation of meaningful synonymous classes in which word-forming, sound-related, idiomatic, word-building as well as other categories of synonyms occur with high frequency.

The relationship between forming synonyms in the English language and language evolution is a central issue reflecting what is essential to the shifting features of words as a language changes. In this paper, we focus on two features that distinguish synonyms from other words: a synonym is initially formed by a productive word-forming rule, and the semantic aspects of synonyms are similar to those formed by this rule. In other words, forms synthesized by different language modules, including both lexemes and function words, cannot be considered as synonyms. Syntactic and morphological features of words are relevant to this distinction, thus sympathize with attempts to derive syntactic properties of words from their definitions. These close connections allow us to use computable and economizable resources for research, but also those developed in the context of more elaborate issues such as the evolution of morphology, syntax, and pragmatics.