Semantics question - враньё и ложь

[slovami.livejournal.com]

Hello, community members! Happy Victory Day!

My friend's mother is interested in philosophy, and she recently heard a lecture about language and morality, where the professor - who is a philosopher, but not a linguist and not a Russian speaker(!) - argued that some languages have different words for "to lie" where one word is used for bad lies and another for less-bad lies. His example was Russian, враньё versus ложь. My friend's mom wanted to know - is it true that these words have different meanings and different moral values? (Like, ложь is really bad, and враньё is not so bad?)

I didn't know. What do you think?

Comments

Re: Tales, Fibs, and Lies

[slovami.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought about this, too. I wasn't at the philosopher's lecture, but it really seems like his argument (which reportedly involved something about how it's hard to write laws and treaties in Russian, because of the moral ambiguity of lying) is just ridiculous.

Re: Tales, Fibs, and Lies

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

>it's hard to write laws and treaties in Russian, because of the moral ambiguity of lying

Laws and treaties in Russian are written in legal Russian, which makes no difficulty to single out and convey one single meaning of any word or expression, just as legal English does. I have no idea where did your philosopher get this strange concept. Maybe he was thinking (judging by how Russia and Russians were portrayed in Hollywood movies) that Russians were some kind of an ancient tribe with an archaic language, which did not have branches such as academic, legal, scientific, vernacular, obscene etc. Well, when we see Hollywood movies with Russians in them, we even start to believe the same thing ourselves -- until we get back to everyday life, where we need to use all those well-elaborated branches of Russian language in various everyday occasions.

Re: Tales, Fibs, and Lies

[slovami.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd really like to meet this philosopher guy. I kind of want to get his name from my friend's mom and write him a little note.

If we want to give him slightly more credit, we can imagine that he gets his information about Russians not only from Hollywood movies, but has perhaps done some reading on the problems with rule of law in post-Soviet Russia - bribery, impenetrable bureaucracy, corruption, etc. But if he wants to argue that those problems come from linguistic inadequacies, well, he's still an idiot!

Re: Tales, Fibs, and Lies

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

At least bribery, bureacuracy and corruption do not appear out of the absence (or ambundance) of the words that define them.

Re: Tales, Fibs, and Lies

[nataxxa.livejournal.com]

I am quite sure that you will never see вранье in laws or any official papers. And no judge in court will say 'Показания Иванова - вранье", if it is not in tv-show:))