Too many synonyms?

[DEVARAKONDA VENKATA NARAYANA SARMA]

At 10:10 AM 9/14/97 -0400, you wrote:
>DEVARAKONDA VENKATA NARAYANA SARMA <narayana at hd1.vsnl.net.in> wrote:
>> Is this confined to nouns? What is the current thinking concerning one
>> dhAtu (root) representing many actions (e.g., `divu krIda vijigIsha
>> vyavahara dyuti stuti mOda mada swapna kanti gatishu') and one action
>> being represented by many dhAtus in sanskrit.
>
>Please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that Indian lexicography
>assumes that if two words have approximately similar meanings in one context,
>then they are exact synonyms. This is provably false in many living
languages.
>For example, in English, `I looked at the painting' and `I saw the
>painting' are not too far off in meaning, `I saw the movie' and `I watched
>the movie' are viturally identical, but `I looked at X' and `I watched X'
>are seldom equivalent. [An amusing game based on such things, for nouns,
>is one I learned from New Scientist: Follow a chain of `synonyms' in
>a standard thesaurus till the last one is an antonym of the first.]
>
>How far is the seeming polysemy and existence of several synonyms due
>to this assumption, and how far is it part and parcel of Sanskrit?
>[i.e, are there manuals in Sanskrit meant to illustrate the distinctions
>between words of broadly similar meaning?]
>
>

First of all let me correct the transliteration of the example I have
given. It is  `divu krIDA vijigIshA vyavahAra dyuti stuti mOda mada swapna
kAnti gatishu'.
This is the first dhatu in DivAdi GaNa. The single root `divu' is supposed
to represent 10 dufferent actions that are listed above. krIDa = play,
vijigIshA =
desire to conquer, vyavahara = conduct, dyuti =