call the false τὸ ψεῦδος. This word has another stem entirely and another root and accordingly another basic meaning, not directly ascertainable. In the root "λαθ" resides "concealing." That is not what ψεῦδος means, at least not immediately. We are tempted to point out that also in our language the counter-word to "truth," namely, "falsity," is an entirely different word. But perhaps the Greek counterwords ἀλήθεια—ψεῦδος are closer to each other than our corresponding words "truth" and "falsity." It could be that ψεῦδος can be thought appropriately only in reference to ἀλήθεια, but it could just as well be, precisely because ψεῦδος is the ordinary counter-word to ἀλήθεια, that it will suggest how ἀλήθεια itself is to be experienced.
In the attempt to trace the basic meanings of words and word-forms we are often guided, of course, by inadequate ideas of language in general, which then contribute to the current misjudgments about the very inquiry into basic meanings. We are wrong to think that the word-forms of a language originally possessed the pure basic meaning, which then got lost with the passage of time and became distorted. The basic and root meaning, on this view, remains quite hidden and only appears in the so-called "derivations." But this theory already leads us astray, for it presupposes that there would exist somewhere the "pure basic meaning" in itself, from which then other meanings would be "derived." These erroneous ideas, reigning supreme in linguistics even today, originate in the circumstance that the first reflection on language, Greek grammatics, was developed under the guiding lines of "logic," i.e., the theory of declarative assertions, propositional theory. Accordingly, propositions are composed out of words, and the latter denote "concepts." These indicate what is represented "in general" in the word. This "general" of the concept is then considered to be the "basic meaning." And the "derivations" are particularizations of the general.
Even though our thoughtful inquiry is aiming here at a basic meaning, we are nevertheless guided by an entirely different conception of the word and of language. To claim we are involved in a so-called "word-philosophy," which sorts out everything from mere verbal meanings, is admittedly very convenient, but it is also such a superficial view it does not even deserve to be labeled false. What we are calling the basic meaning of words is their beginning, which does not appear at first, but at last, and even then never as a detached formation, a specimen we could represent as something for itself. The so-called basic meaning holds sway in a veiled manner in all the modes of saying the respective word.
The counter-word to "unconcealing" (true), ἀληθές, has quite an unrelated sound: ψεῦδος. We translate τὸ ψεῦδος as "the false," without exactly knowing what "false" means here and how it is to be thought-above all in the Greek sense. In any case it would now finally