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Anekanta : Philosophy of co-existence
The implication of this naya is that meaning of a word necessarily varies with the variation of the tense, gender and number, because no additional part of a word is meaningless. Any additional element in a word is bound to introduce a novelty of meaning.
The Etymological Viewpoint (samabhirūdhanaya)
This viewpoint of etymology is much subtler than the verbal viewpoint. The synonymous words, according to this viewpoint, have different meanings, and they do not stand for an identical referent. For linguistic exactness we use specific words to connote specific modes. The practice of bracketing synonyms followed in the vocabularies is a defective method according to this viewpoint. Each word has a shade of its own which makes it irreplaceable by any other word, however close its connotation may be. A morphological difference in a word presupposes a corresponding difference in the meaning intended by the speaker. No two words can be used to denote the selfsame referent. Such use would involve confusion and contradiction. The power of expression should vary from word to word because the absence of variation would obliterate the morphological distinction of the words. Consequently the two words should be admitted as one single verbal symbol. It is, therefore, asserted by this etymological viewpoint that the use of different words should be governed by the difference in the meaning sought to be expressed by
them.
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