As an analogy, a MacBook is a type of laptop, and laptops, desktops and tablets are all IT devices (for lack of a better word). Apple might have you believe that a MacBook is very different from a laptop and belongs in its own category, but to me I would still lump it under laptops. If I was presented with a MacBook, a desktop and a tablet and was asked to pick out the laptop, then it would be clear to me that the MacBook is the correct choice.
Now, midori (green) is a type of ao ("grue"), and ao, kiiro (yellow) and aka (red) are all colours. English speakers argue that green is very different from blue and that they're different colours, but to Japanese speakers ao encompasses midori. If a Japanese speaker was presented with the colours green, yellow and red and was asked to pick out ao (in the context of traffic lights), then it would be clear that green is the correct choice.
There are loads of situations where words in two languages seem to directly correspond to each other, but still they are subtly different especially when the nuances of the words are considered.
Word meanings are fuzzy clouds of references and nuances, and every language has slightly different clouds. There is nothing magical about this, despite the recurrent lizard-brain notion that words or names are somehow mystical and intrinsic, and that these differences must somehow be meaningful.
Differences are quite common with colour terms - you don’t need to go to Japanese (blue-green) or Ancient Greek (wine dark sea) for this. My own (European) first language draws a slightly different word cloud around the colours pink and purple than English does, for example. One word is only for hot pink, and the other is for purple and non-hot pinks.
I assure you I see these colours the same as you do. If I were to use the English word “purple” to refer to more of a pink hue, it would be a mere language interference error, not some mystical Saphir-Whorf insight into the culturally-conditioned operation of my retinas.
Words are not perception. This is such a pernicious bit of nonsense, and journalists and writers are especially susceptible to it because it flatters them, in their role as word-smiths. Languages are way more interesting than this pseudo-intellectual mysticism.
The Japanese are just as capable of distinguishing blue and green as anyone else, and they use blue traffic lights for the same reason they drive on the left - because it doesn’t actually matter what convention they pick, so long as everyone agrees on it and sticks to it.
https://www.thebrickfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/LEGO-...
That would be a good point, if that actually happened, but Japanese traffic lights have a mixture of green for go and blue for go (with most of them being green).
But there also are some basic truths about human vision.
We only see three "simplified" different colors, red, blue and green, and other nuances are interpolations our brains make. There is infinitely more frequency information in light that we just don't pick up.
So I would expect that the primary colors red/blue/green, which are grounded in human physiology, were universally recognized across languages. To the extent they're not, that's confusing.
Language is certainly not the sole factor of conscious interpretation of all phenomena, stimuli and mechanisms that induce it, but it definitely is a factor with measurable effects.
And probably this is a skill where individual feel like the largest degree of freedom — the topic of whether this feeling is a mental illusion or backed on hard-wired physics is a distinct point.
Trying to destroy credibility of whole class of people striking them with an anathema like "mysticism" implies forgetting a bit quickly that Descarte’s grand scheme of thought came to live thanks to three dreams, Newton was found of alchemy and Russel dedicated a whole essay specifically to "Mysticism and Logic".
> I assure you I see these colours the same as you do.
Maybe not if I’m colour blind, right?
Now, this is not to promote the extreme other side: I don’t believe in an "absolute relativism" that would allow culture to shape arbitrary anything anyway regardless of any fundamental conditions that enabled human beings to form.
But certainly there a whole set of shade between this two poles (and beyond the linear spectrum they induce).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect
https://www.cairn.info/qu-est-ce-que-rever--9782749256627-pa...
> pseudo-intellectual mysticism
The influence of words on perception is backed by a lot of research and expertise, and seems apparent on a concrete level: The words I choose affect others perceptions; people who make their living in persuasion (political leaders, opinion leaders, 'influencers', etc) put great effort into chosing words that will influence perception, and they do it to great success.
Why do you think otherwise?
What makes you say otherwise? When you say 'pernicious', that implies negative intent - whose intent? (If that's not meant literally, I take back this particular question.)
Surely no one believes a native English speaker only experienced schadenfreude after that word was imported from German?
I assure you that you do not. Don't want to get too philosophical or biological on you but we all see colors differently. Every single one of us. Even identical twins.
It isn't. TFA is vague on this, but in modern usage "ao" just means blue. There are a bunch of set phrases where it refers to various other cool colors, but to a modern listener "ao" on its own isn't a category including all those colors, it just means blue.
Especially the fact that it tends to impact the speakers ability to perceive shades of the color.
I have long heard that Japan has blue traffic lights.
Earlier this year I visited Japan.
Because I had heard about the blue traffic light situation, I paid special attention to the traffic lights.
They all appeared green to me. In both Tokyo and Osaka.
Okay maybe a tinge of blue if you look at it and wonder 'is this blue?', but the only reason I wondered was because I had heard the blue traffic light trivia. If I had never heard about it I wouldn't have given it a second thought.
However, the picture in the linked article seems to have an unmistakable blue color; I don't understand what's going on.
Beautiful country by the way; would love to visit again :)
What colour is this? Blue.
No, can't you see it's green? Maybe it has some green in it
Okay, so is it blue or green? Yes!
That adjective in Japanese means both blue and green. The Japanese language didn't have a widely-adopted word for just "green" - 緑 (みどり) "midori" - until after WWII.
Green apples or vegetables are still "aoi", for example. I lived in Japan for four years and never saw a blue traffic light.
Why they do that is something you can argue about and I’ve heard Japanese try and come up with all sorts of explanations:
“The character for blue is easier to learn than the one for green, so it’s better to say blue with children.”
“They used to be blue, so we still just call it that”
“Green isn’t an original Japanese color. Before foreigners arrived we didn’t call anything green”
“They are blue!” - usually these are people who will call traffic lights in Europe and smarties blue even when speaking English.
It’s just a quirk. I think Japan places the border between blue and green different from most western cultures and that gives.
The traffic lights have an abnormally high amount of blue light for being an overall green light, to help people with red-green colorblindness to tell the difference between the red and "green" light.
If you take a look at the green light on a dash cam, you might see that the color is abnormally bluer than what you might see in real life.
> www.rd.com
> Checking if the site connection is secure
> www.rd.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
>Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
Which you'd know if you read the guidelines (:
Although the latter does contain a complete misrepresentation of what "grue" means.
The explanation is still unsatisfying. Japan had green lights, referred to in law by a word which means blue but has traditionally encompassed green as well. Pedants pointed out that it would be better if the law explicitly said green. Rather than changing the law or letting things be, the government ordered lights be changed to blue-green. This is, on the face of it, completely insane behaviour, but neither article attempts to explain why the government did this.
Then in the 1970s the rules changed to recommend bluer shades of green, and new lights made afterwards reflected that. None of the articles I found gave a concrete reason; a few suggested bluer lights were easier to see, and a few implied the change was motivated by the "ao" name.
How is it insane? Did the outcome turn out to be chaos and mass murder? Are the Japanese people all becoming lunatics due to the cognitive burden of trying to remember the differences between one foreign color word and the other? Will the Reticulan Space Navy destroy the Japanese for their insults to chromaticity?
This isn't insane. It's just boringly bureaucratic.
Some example photos from google image that look closest to what I've seen: https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/129881591-traffic-l... https://depositphotos.com/editorial/traffic-lights-ginza-dis...
I've not really left Kantō so maybe they are more likely to be more prominently blue elsewhere? Kansai and Hokkaidō google image searches show (mostly) green traffic lights too.
But well, the US never follows any agreement it signs, so yeah, that happens.
Since then I have rendered all figures for public consumption in black and white, and lines instead of surfaces where possible.
Here's a talk by the creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU
Here's a little article about it (with some R specifics): https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...
Also, another way to find out how common colorblindness is among your male friends: go rock climbing in a gym. Color is used on the holds to signify the route, and colorblind people who quickly start asking about color as they're climbing.
I just turn that on, open the camera and look at my color pallete through the camera.
I see green lights as white, which is fine most of the time because of the order.
The exception is when there's a lot of glare from the sun setting behind me, and I sometimes can't tell if it's green, or just the sun reflecting at the right angle. It also washes out the red and yellow, making it harder to see if they're lit.
For 3 lights streetlights no. For 2 lights streetlights it depends. They can be (in DE) either red and yellow or yellow or green.
The people who do not see red at all however, see red as black. So, they do not see red traffic light at all.
That argument has two issues: First, not all US traffic lights have order, as single-light ones replace stop signs in some (mostly suburban/rural) areas. Second, light position is still hard to discern at night.
My personal take: the red and yellow hues in traffic lights are often indistinguishable for those of us with red-green colorblindness.
In southern Germany it is called Blue Cabagge (Blaukraut).
If you ask people in Germany what the color of the vegetable is, they will answer "purple" (lila). There are some strange ways in the evolution of a language, depending on the region and events in the region.
It's normal, whatever normal means in this case, to think that a color is the same as a similar hue, in my example above, between red and blue you can find purple, violet "lilac" hues.
As a personal anecdote, the name for (orange) carrot in Southern Bavarian dialect is Gelberübe, Rübe for root vegetable and Gelb for yellow, also yellow is connected with orange in the brain and the language of the people.
A purple carrot has the honor to be called "lilane GelbeRübe", or purple yellow vegetable root in English.
For example, if you cook it with apple (which is acidic), it will turn redder.
This particular cabbage is coloured by a chemical that responds to the pH of the stuff it comes into contact with. The colour can range from quite bright red to quite clear blue, and even green or yellow.
It's perfectly possible for the red cabbages to be turned into blue dishes, and the pH of the soil will also have a large effect on the colour produced by the plant. You can see on various stock photos how the plant has a clear blue hue (before harvesting, at least): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/rotkraut.html?pseudoid=562... Even ignoring the leaves, the outside of the parts that generally get cooked have a clear blue hue in many pictures I can see.
The reason "lila" wasn't used to describe the cabbage is that the German language lacked a word for it. It entered the German vocabulary somewhere in the 19th century (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lila#German). In a similar fashion, there was no separate word for orange in many European languages until somewhere around the 15th-16th century, when oranges (the fruit) were starting to get imported. You had yellow-red and other hue combinations, but it wasn't as separate as it is today.
I'm sure there were people who used "Rotblaukohl", but it makes sense that only one colour remained.
As for the carrot, orange carrots were actually not all the common for centuries. The original plants now known as carrots were imported to Europe from the middle east and cultivated in the Netherlands, but orange carrots weren't all that common in Europe before the 16th/17th century. The base plant of the orange carrot was actually white/yellow and got its orange outside hue quite some time later, after selective breeding. I wouldn't be surprised if the carrots that were first exported to modern German areas were still yellow in colour. Gelbrübe for orange carrots makes a lot of sense, historically.
I do like the "purple yellow root" name, especially since the first carrot cultivars to reach Europe (long before orange/yellow carrots) were actually purple. I don't think they received quite the popularity carrots received, at least not much further north than the Mediterranean.
This is totally it, some people just decided to name it the way they saw it, and depending on the region were they lived.
Rotblaukohl was probably the middle ground, but there's in German a rule to join two colors: das blaurote Kleid (the blue-red dress), in this case it would mean the dress has two colors blue and red.
I might be very far from my area of expertise TBH.
Some translators avoid this issue by always using the term "blue/green", which is really awkward, and I couldn't find any explanation for it before learning about "the crayola-ification of the world" [0]. Before I thought that was a poetic literary device.
It is really hard not to think of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis when learning about this. At the same time, taoist philosophy tends to point out that misery comes from our mind's discriminating eye; everything is categorized in boxes, good and bad, concept and not-concept. Maybe having more categories is better from a technical standpoint, but more difficult to handle from a spiritual standpoint? At the same time, this spiritual view tend to see man as needing to overcome his beastly nature, and thus this added technical discrimination is not burden since it is simply part of the path towards a higher level of consciousness?
[0] https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...
Very interesting. Could you explain this part in a little more detail?
There is a well known trick (I don't know if there's actual research behind) that when asked for a tool and a color, people will answer red hammer. There are many tools and colors but these come to mind quickly because they are so frequent, simple, etc. Therefore the concept used for information retrieval implicitly creates a set of all possible words that satisfy it. For instance "bird" will make the person think of pigeons, sparrows, crows, so it naturally implies "flight". It's only by precising either "flightless" or a specific flightless bird that the association is removed. The implication goes both ways: flightless birds tend to not come to mind, despite chickens being extremely common. Furthermore, it is quite counterintuitive to just take arbitrary conjunction of categories (e.g. a bird or a chair). By comparison, discriminating further is very easy, and people tend to be able to much easier think of different elements of the same subcategory (e.g. different breeds of pigeons).
Koans tend to revolve around erroneous thought or language patterns, and so having the "blue or green" category was an obvious example of falling into either of my known boxes (blue or green) before being reminded that the concept encompassed both.
I’ve since noticed that I think this question of where “that is definitely green” ends and “that is obviously blue” begins is different for lots of countries
Here is a good video on colour and how many cultures perceive colour and name them, or not.
"The surprising pattern behind color names around the world" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg&t=35s
There's something going on here that the article doesn't explain.
The new word is written 緑, which is also [the Japanese simplified spelling of] the Chinese word that means green in specific. But the Chinese word has always referred to a color, and it's never meant "sprout" -- the shuowen jiezi, written 800 years before the period the article indicates, defines it "帛靑黃色也"!
So by the time this word is being written down, there is no sense of the concept "sprout" at all.
The article seems to present this as a case of conceptual innovation internal to Japanese, which would have been much cooler than the apparent reality of the Japanese starting to use an already well-established concept more often.
Now I want to know why, if midori originally meant "sprout", it does not seem to have the spelling 芽 ("sprout" - 萌芽也) as a possibility...?
What I'm saying is:
1. If "midori" began with the meaning "sprout", then...
2. its spelling in early texts should have been 芽 [sprout] and not 綠 [green].
The spellings were fixed a long time before the article identifies the change as taking place.
The Japanese spelling of a word must develop by either (1) the Japanese borrowing a Chinese word with the meaning of the Japanese word; (2) option #1, but the Japanese meaning of the word later shifts; (3) option #1, but the Japanese spelling of the word later shifts [this would be weird]; (4) indigenous innovation of a character; or (5) refusal to use a character at all.
"Midori" appears to have begun its life by being spelled as if it meant "green" and to have continued to mean "green" since that time. This is strange if it originally meant "sprout", and I'd like to know more about the claim and the history.
https://kotobank-jp.translate.goog/word/%E9%9D%92%E8%91%89-2...
The blue-green distinction is a late feature of most languages.
Even Greek and Latin did not have as clear a distinction as we have today.
The Greek had no word for blue, which is the reason Homer described the sky with different words. But I never heard that the sky was green-isch.
While on the other side the Greek had more similarities between green and yellow.
Already in Homer the word for blue was "cuaneos", which means of the color of "cuanos", like "chruseos" (golden) means of the color of "chrusos" (gold).
"Cuanos" was initially the name for the blue pigment that now is named "ultramarine blue", which was an expensive pigment imported from Afghanistan.
Later, "cuanos" was also used as a name for other cheaper blue pigments that could be used to substitute the expensive ultramarine blue, i.e. for the azurite mined in Cyprus and for the artificial pigment "Egyptian blue".
The English word "cyan" comes from the Greek word "cuaneos", but due to a misunderstanding it is used now for blue-green, despite the fact that it was never used for blue-green by the Greeks. In the Ancient Greece and Rome, when blue-green had to be distinguished from green, it was specified as the color of the beryls, or as the color of turquoise, or as the color of the littoral sea.
While in Greek there was an unambiguous word for blue, what was missing was a word for green. Green is mentioned very rarely in what I have read, and when it is mentioned they use one of the following expressions: the color of the emeralds (smaragdinos), the color of grass (poodes) or the color of leek (praseos).
In the early Greek authors, "chloros" that is now used to mean green in many scientific terms was not used for green, but perhaps for yellow or yellow-green, e.g. Homer uses "chloros" for the color of some honey.
The Romans did have a word for blue, but it only applied to the sky.
Which other countries have blue traffic lights?
綠 is used in Japanese for the color of green tea, but they use 青 for the green light
There's also 翠 in Japanese to mean a bright green, which in Chinese also has a blue connotation (based on the color of the kingfisher who dives 淬 to catch fish)
All words are descriptions for a continuous range of colours. Oa apparently just covers a particularly huge range. But you could equally say "ha those stupid English people only have one word for lilac and purple. Idiots!"
I assume this is like how ‘pink’ is a special word for ‘light-red’.
They appear green because of the warmer light that incandescent bulbs give off. I imagine that things transition to LED they’ll choose warmer light frequencies to continue this effect? https://mytrafficlights.com/why-does-the-green-lens-on-my-tr...
I think that they turned to blue for things of years and years of sun rays and raining and other climate things.
I think the use of blue to mean both blue and green has also been present in Korea for a long time.
I wonder where it came from? In my limited experience if Korea and Japan share something culturally it often has its common derivation in Chineese tradition.
青天 - clear skies
青草 - green grass
清葡萄 - 청포도 - white grape
When traffic lights were first created, they simply didn't have the technology to create a great pure yellow, so amber was used instead, and people understood the color they were aiming for.
Now I live in the US and the lights here look the same as NZ but I'm pretty badly colorblind so they're just words to me :)
Horizontal rather than vertical lights were new to me here. They make sense because they don't swing around in the wind.
I'm not sure if there's any connection to why Japanese tend to lean towards blue rather than green but the Japanese word for green, midori (緑) is linguistically different from most other colors. It doesn't have a true adjective form and is instead used as a noun or "adjectival noun". Does this difference create a subconscious aversion to it in the Japanese psyche? I really have no idea.
To deal with the voiced plosives that are present in many modern loanwords, from languages like English, they had to develop ways to write them, using the existing letters of their alphabet, and the solution was to use digraphs, like "mp" for English "b".
Color in general can be subjective, even between people of the same culture and language group. There's an interesting experiment with color in this video around yellow lasers that might help get the idea across.
But I searched my photo history for Japan and here are the first few that have traffic lights in them: https://imgur.com/a/S815y7o
This should help you determine what colour the lights are in your perception. Some are taken with a Canon DSLR and some are taken with a Pixel 3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-7565...
Knowledge that some hypothesis where disproved is also crucially important to understating and formation of sounder models.
Regarding the adequacy of the assertion itself, every reader should judge by themselves to which level it extends.
Mad that they just add the numbers thing there, but never mention if there's a number play with green/blue
https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2012/03/13/why-does-jenkins-have...
I still don't forgive Jenkins for giving in and replacing blue with green.