Synonym Elimination

[Skittles]

Just a quick question.

Is it feasible, possible, worth the time to eliminate synonyms from a conlang?

Why, why not, etc?

[Cedh]

If you start writing texts in your conlang, you'll quickly find that you need synonyms (at least partial ones) in order to get some kind of "writing style" going, instead of always using the same word for referring to somebody/something that occurs in your text several times. All natlangs have quite a bit of synonymy.

If you're creating a philosophical language, aiming at unambiguous parsing rather than realism, the matter might be different. But I guess even then it would be quite difficult to eliminate all synonyms from the language; they'll just start to creep back in because of the associative way the human mind works.

[zompist]

If by accident I find that I've created synonyms, I'll introduce some difference, even if it's just register or origin. It's an opportunity to make the semantics a little more interesting.

[Radius Solis]

All natlangs have quite a bit of synonymy.

Depends what counts as synonymy, though. As with what zompist does, I'd guess that most synonym pairs in natural languages do not perfectly match, they just overlap a lot, or else they differ by register, origin, syntactic distribution, or what they're associated with - like how English "hair" and "fur" might well be considered synonyms by speakers of some other language, differing only by animals vs. people as their associated ideas, or "say" and "speak" might be considered synonyms even though "say" can take quotative complements while "speak" cannot, and "speak" can indicate reciprocal action while "say" cannot.

[Cedh]

All natlangs have quite a bit of synonymy.

Depends what counts as synonymy, though. As with what zompist does, I'd guess that most synonym pairs in natural languages do not perfectly match, they just overlap a lot, or else they differ by register, origin, syntactic distribution, or what they're associated with - like how English "hair" and "fur" might well be considered synonyms by speakers of some other language, differing only by animals vs. people as their associated ideas, or "say" and "speak" might be considered synonyms even though "say" can take quotative complements while "speak" cannot, and "speak" can indicate reciprocal action while "say" cannot.

I agree with this; my post above definitely presupposes a definition of "synonymy" that includes non-perfect synonyms. (Actually, I tend to believe that perfect synonyms are impossible in natlangs, because at least some speakers will associate slightly different things with each word in such pairs.)