this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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Genuinely though, English seems to lack the distinction between truth (the absolute state of something being universally true), truth (something that is correct from some point of view) and truth (an idea someone is dedicated to).
Some other languages have different words for these "truths". You could say that first is truth, second is perspective, and third is an idea, but all three can be named "truth", which can easily spark a debate over simple misunderstanding of what you mean, exactly.
Truth opinion and belief
Factt opinion and belief. The word truth is a statement over belief of something.
English has loads of words for the spectrum between fact and baseless claim, it's just people have decided "truth" is contested, this is mostly that news on both sides of American politics report differently, producing often conflicting supposed facts, to the point where people say truth doesn't matter anymore
People take that idea differently, from the sane end where it's just the state of sectarian news through to the crazy end where they think nothing is real
Illustrative is one side of American political followers didn't believe in COVID-19, the other side wore masks, avoided gatherings, and got vaccinated when vaccines became available
I would argue that the first and third are perversions of the word. A truth that is universal should be called a law. Like the law of entropy. Unfortunately the word "law" has also ben twisted to mean legal policy. The third should be "belief," as it is what you hold inside you. Religion call their beliefs "truth" to push their agenda.
The obsession to have dedicated words when one would rarely bother to specify and just use the generic term anyway will forever elude me.
There is very little difference to me between saying two 1 syllable words and one two syllable words. And English is a very packed language. Most english wordy things already have meaning and reserving a 1 syllable thing that is sufficiently different to be distinguishable is just not realistic.
English is a dogshit creole that also lacks distinction between libre and gratis and "cultural artist" and "visual artist" (Turkish : sanatkar v ressam)
English is not a creole language.
To keep it simple, a creole language originates from children learning a pidgin (a contact "language" with barely any grammar), and "gluing" the lexicon with features on the spot. To the point its grammar doesn't resemble any of the parent languages over the course of, like, a single generation.
In the meantime English is simply a West Germanic language that got a bunch of borrowings from Old Norse and then Norman+French. Those borrowings don't change affiliation.
Regarding the distinction between "libre" and "gratis": it's simply that "free" displaced "costless". That sort of semantic shift happens, it's most of the time internal (i.e. not caused by interference of other languages).
It does not at all lack the ability to distinguish between any of those things, it just doesn't do so in single words