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The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. And one of those (pravda) is a kind of a half-truth used to keep moving from the current situation.

Russians know they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.



>The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth.

I looked into this, and found this blog post [1]. The comments are quite interesting, but the main post points out this isn't much different from English. In English we use synonyms for truth/true (e.g. authentic, factual, legitimate, etc) and lie (e.g. fabrication, falsehood, misrepresentation, disinformation) with different meanings too.

Maybe we shouldn't use vocabulary of a language to draw/imply further conclusions about a culture.

[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29814


The eskimos have fifty five billion words for snow but only one word for Bitcoin.


Pravda means truth. Pravda was also name of state journal. The half-truth is said as half-pravda. English has many words for lie too: misinformation, lie, untruth, false, deceit, deception, dishonesty, disinformation, distortion, evasion, fabrication, falsehood, fiction, forgery, misrepresentation, perjury, slander, tale. I got them from synonyms dictionary.

That does not say anything about English speaking people other then their language is rich and can express nuance.


English has a lot of synonyms, redundancy, alternatives, ways-to-say, and overlapping constructs. In that context, the many English words for lie is an uninformative truth. English has so many words for lie because English has too many words for everything.


> they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.

Same can be said about the west. What matters is that there is free press, call it "picking your favorite lies", but it makes a big difference.


From my relatively uneducated knowledge pravda stems from pravo (legal rights) e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russkaya_Pravda it changed meaning over the centuries though




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