sinonomie

Sinonomie is a multidisciplinary field that studies naming systems and sign networks across languages and cultures. It investigates how signs—words, symbols, and proper names—acquire meaning, how they relate through synonymy, polysemy, and cultural association, and how naming practices influence social cognition and cultural identity.

The term sinonomie is a neologism used in theoretical discussions, and there is no universally standardized definition. In practice, researchers describe it as an integrative approach that draws on semiotics, onomastics, and lexical semantics. The etymology is debated; some interpret it as a synthesis of signs and naming, while others treat it as a portmanteau without a fixed origin.

Research methods include cross-linguistic corpus analysis, semiotic interpretation of signs, onomastic surveys of given names and place names, experimental semantics, and computational modeling of synonym networks and sign associations.

Core topics encompass cross-language synonym networks, cross-cultural naming conventions, brand naming and translation equivalence, and the design of multilingual information systems that preserve naming diversity and semantic similarity.

Applications range from improving machine translation and localization to branding strategy, cultural heritage documentation, and information retrieval in multilingual databases. Critics note that sinonomie lacks a widely adopted definition and standardized methods, and that it risks overlapping with established disciplines such as semiotics and onomastics unless its scope is clearly delineated.