English truth was first a pledge, not a proposition — the quality of a trustworthy person, cognate with 'tree' and 'trust.' Spanish verdad, from Latin veritas, asks not 'is she faithful?' but 'is it real?' — ontological rather than relational. Chinese 真 reaches that same ground by a wholly independent path: the authentic thing distinguished from its counterfeit. Zamenhof chose the Latin root over the Germanic, quietly voting for truth-as-reality in the language he built for humanity.
Old English trēowth / trīewth denoted faithfulness and fidelity before broadening to propositional truth. 'True,' 'trust,' and 'troth' (a pledged promise) are siblings from the same root.
The regularized modern form is read as: what the eye (目) can verify as genuine, divided (八) from imitation — a figure (匕) that stands for itself rather than mimics another. The precise ancient form is contested: the seal-script version suggests a somewhat different composition, possibly depicting a person in a particular stance of authenticity. The consistent semantic thread across the character's history is authentic-versus-counterfeit — what is not a copy, what has not been performed — rather than truth as a logical property of statements.
真 is productively compounded: 真相 (zhēnxiàng, 'true appearance' = the real state of affairs), 真实 (zhēnshí, genuine/real/authentic). The word family covers truth-as-authenticity at least as much as truth-as-proposition.
Related forms: vera (adj., true), vere (adv., truly), verŝajne (seemingly/probably — ver- + ŝajn- 'to seem' + -e adverb suffix). The productive Esperanto suffix system makes the entire word family unusually transparent.
Four languages, two philosophies: the Germanic tongue remembers that you must be true before you can tell the truth, while the Latin, Chinese, and constructed tongues ask only that the thing itself be real.