Synonymity

विस्तारः (द्रष्टुं नोद्यम्)

DHH Ingalls observes one reason for this strength of Sanskrit

Sanskrit not only has an enormous vocabulary; it has also a larger choice of synonyms than any other language I know. In a natural language there are probably no synonyms.

Of course, one can go to a thesaurus and find what are called synonyms. For the English word ‘house’ one may find ‘dwelling,’ ‘residence,’ ‘tenement,’ ‘abode,’ and so on. But these are not true synonyms as one can see the moment one tries to interchange them. One cannot say of the Vanderbilts that they lived in a large tenement in Newport, Rhode Island. Each word in English has connotations that it cannot shed and that permit it to be used only in an appropriate social and emotional setting.

There is even a genre of English humor, perhaps best exemplified by S. J. Perelman, which gains its effect by dropping words into a setting which cries out, so to speak, against their connotations. This form of humor was never developed beyond a rudimentary stage in Sanskrit, for while Sanskrit distinguishes, it is true, between poetic words and matter-of-fact words, it achieves within each of these categories an extraordinary degree of synonymity. The poetic words for house in Sanskrit— and Sanskrit has far more words for this object than English-differ chiefly in sound and etymology. They are not bound to a particular social or emotional situation. Thus, veśman is literally the place where one enters, sadman the place where one sits down, vastya the place where one dwells, nilaya and ālaya the place where one alights or comes to rest.+++(5)+++ These words are far more interchangeable than the English ones. Nilaya will do for the dwelling of a king or a farmer or a crow.