(The usual upfront disclaimer: Mods, if this is in the wrong forum, mea culpa, pls. move.)
I’m editing a magazine of logic problems, and the one at the top of the stack at the morning has the heading “Truth-Tellers and Liars.” It’s a pretty standard type of puzzle: a group of people make a series of inter-referential statements and the solver needs to figure out which statements are true and which are false.
For some reason, though, I’m stuck on the fact that there’s no simple antonym for “liar” – we use “truth-teller,” but it’s definitely awkward.
I guess the simple “why” for this lacuna is that we expect people to tell the truth, so there’s no need for a single word for a person who does.
Oh, wait, I need to post this in the form of a question? Okay, how about:
Do other languages have a simple term for “truth-teller”?
The problem you’re going to see is that everybody sees the entire continuum of truth-teller to liar as degrees of liar, i.e., even if you hardly ever lie, that doesn’t make you a truth-teller; it just means you’re not a frequent liar.
That’s not what I was saying, actually.
Telling the truth is as absolute as lying, surely - a sliding scale that slides both ways - making that argument redundant.
Okay, but none of these nouns are based on verbs that have opposites. IOW, there is no such thing as “the opposite of kill,” “the opposite of rob,” “the opposite of preach.”
But there is an “opposite” of telling the truth, which is lying. (Or vice versa.)
So I guess my real question is, why is there no single word for telling the truth?
Phooey! Went for “preview” and hit “submit” by mistake.
My next point was that there are layers of nouns and verbs here.
Killer = person who kills.
Liar = person who lies.
So for each of these nouns, there’s a verb that it’s based on.
To go down one more level, though, there’s a noun associated with “lie” – which is, of course, also “lie.”
Hm, so maybe that’s the anomaly, that we have a situation where there’s both a noun and a verb that are the same word, so I’m looking for the antonym of the bottom level noun, and it’s just coincidence that it’s the same word.
Liar = person who lies [and] person who tells lies.
Murderer = person who murders [and] person who commits murder.
No, that doesn’t work, because there’s no opposite of “murder” (the noun).
Czech has one, and I believe a few other Slavic languages (namely Russian) share it. It’s “pravnik,” which roughly translates to “truther.” It also means “lawyer.”
Ah, but what is lying? Who says what it true or not?
I could say my brother is bald, since I have a full head of hair and he is receding. But if my uncle was here, it could be disputed because my uncle is really bald.
White is said to be the opposite of black - what does that mean? Is eggshell the same as ivory? Is ebony the same as charcoal?
Aren’t opposites sometimes what we call the other choice? Is not a yes equal to a no? Is not a no equal to yes? If we think in terms of yes or no, black or white, or up or down, things begin to crash when the was maybe or no response, gray or I don’t know.
It’s an interesting question, come to think of it. I think all language reflects the society from which it comes. Societies have norms–things which most people are supposed to do (or not do). If a society creates the word truther, for example, it means that this society does not expect most people to tell the truth. But English-language societies have (religious) taboos against baring false witness.
We do have related nouns in English that reflect actual social contexts: whistleblower, for example implies that most people in an organization keep quiet.
It also means “lawyer.”
