I am not sure if this is what Odara-san asked.
In whatever elementary Japanese I know, 前後 work the same way for time & space.
In English preference changes to certain other words also
Discussion
yes, that’s for sure.
It's subjective as an English learner, in Japanese, the same word often has multiple meanings, and in English there are many words (especially adjectives) that express similar nuances!
Yes, English is a bit odd that way.
For nouns, generally there are maybe 1-2 words that means the same.
Like Odara-san said, for adjectives, there are so many words (15-20) for the commonly used ones like big, small, slow, fast, etc. that express many degrees of the same thing.
For example,
big << enormous << gigantic
happy << elated << ecstatic
But I feel Japanese has more of same words meaning different(unrelated) things like hana - in English, mostly even if same word means different things it's related.
The Japanese language is a fusion of words from before the arrival of Chinese characters and words from China.
The number of adjectives in the language before the transmission of Chinese characters is quite small, but when words from China are included, the number of adjectives is quite large.
example:
大きい (big)
巨大、特大、闊大、厖大、絶大、著大、至大、極大、壮大、雄大...
嬉しい (happy)
喜悦、悦喜、歓悦、愉悦、欣悦、欣快、欣懐、怡悦、感悦、欣然...
But some of these words are difficult for modern Japanese, and I needed a thesaurus to list them.
Japanese hana is a bit odd.
One theory is that they used to call the most prominent part of the face and the most prominent part of the plant by the same word.
However, many of the homonyms in Japanese can be explained as resulting from a confluence with Chinese.
With fewer vowels than in Chinese, it happened that the same sound was assigned to Chinese characters with different meanings.