Not a linguist. I feel like this is just an issue of imperfect correspondence between the word "blue" in English and "ao" in Japanese. The article explains the historical reason why ao encompasses both blue and green, so I think the concept of semantic field comes into play here.
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.
I trained as a linguist and you hit the nail on the head.
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.
> it doesn’t actually matter what convention they pick, so long as everyone agrees on it and sticks to it.
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).
Words do seem to have some influence on perception. Specifically, colors appear to be easier to distinguish if they fall within the bounds of separate basic color terms (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104).
The "fuzzy clouds" argument is both true and important.
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.
Did you ever tested the Stroop effect in a language, and how it effects depending on the proficiency in that language?
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).
> Words are not perception. This is such a pernicious bit of nonsense
> 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.)
Thanks for writing this. I cringe every time I see someone drop the phrase “there’s no direct English translation” as if it means there is some unique insight only able to be expressed in that language. Words aren’t isomorphic between languages, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the range of ideas that are available.
Surely no one believes a native English speaker only experienced schadenfreude after that word was imported from German?
> I assure you I see these colours the same as you do.
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.
As an sort of counterbalancing aside, there are two common japanese words for red, the slightly less well known to foreigners is the name for the color of the sun on the japanese flag: beni/kurenai (a deeper red). Well Chinese has the parallel kanjis too but as far as I understand it for the Chinese the semantic values are flipped: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-%E8%B5%...
Chinese has yet another word for red: 彤. It closer to vermillion or what some people might recognize as "Chinese red" that one sees painted on doors and temples.
> Now, midori (green) is a type of ao ("grue"), and..
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.
I think yellow and amber are a good example of similar confusion in English. According to the NYS driver's manual, traffic lights are yellow and marker lights on vehicles are amber. They both look yellow to me. Doing some research around the Internets, I see people insisting that governments always call traffic lights amber, but that's not true. Either way, nobody knows what "amber" means except people manufacturing lights and people that just looked it up because they're reading a comment about it. But, again, if you ask someone "is the middle traffic light amber?" they'd probably say yes, just like Japanese people will be happy to mark the green light as ao.
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 :)
I have been to Japan a couple of times. The first time I was there in 2016 many of the lights were very blue with hint of green. I noticed when I was there over the summer that the lights were getting greener, many of them pretty much just green. I think they have been transitioning, perhaps as they have updated to LED lights or something they have been making them more green?
My memory form my time living in Japan is that they do not have a consistent shade of blue/green that their traffic lights conform to. You will see completely different colors depending on the location, and even see different colors within the same location. Some areas are more blue and some areas are more green.
I am looking out my hotel room window in Hiroshima in this very instant, and I even got my wife to confirm it: The traffic lights definitely are GREEN.
I'm glad you mentioned that you had your wife confirm, because I'm convinced my wife sees more colours than I do, and I can't be the only one. I've had this exact discussion.
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!
The "go" signal in traffic lights in Japan is 青い (あおい) "aoi".
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.
This is pretty far off base - for a start, the first JP law on traffic lights in the 1930s used midori, not ao. Per jp references, ao/midori split into distinct meanings around the Heian~Kamakura periods (so 800-1000 years ago).
Do you know more about the history of this color use? It’s surprising to me that midori uses the kanji for green in Chinese if it’s such a recent idea in Japan.
Japan has green traffic lights, there are no two ways around it. I’ve lived in Japan for 3 years in all the major cities. They are green, just like everywhere else. They just call them blue.
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.
I have never seen the big main lights using blue instead of green anywhere in Japan; the traffic lights for pedestrians however were blue in some places.
A lot of traffic lights in the US are actually "not just green".
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.
How old are you roughly? The reason I ask is that the eye lens yellows with age and transmits less blue and violet through. So colors that would look blue-green to a younger eye would look more green to an older one.
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.
I just scanned a few articles on this. TFA and its source don't mention this, but the first JP traffic law for traffic lights (from 1930) used midori/green, following US standards. But apparently newspapers mostly used "ao" for whatever reason, and that was the usage that became widespread. Then later on (1947) the traffic law was updated to say "ao", presumably to match common usage. Of course the actual lights were green the whole time.
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.
> This is, on the face of it, completely insane behaviour, but neither article attempts to explain why the government did this.
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.
This reminds me of when I took my drivers' license test in Japan -- they'll do an eye exam including whether you can recognize the colors. The first color was this weird mix between blue and green, and when the administrator asked me what color was showing, it took me a moment to try to find a word to describe the color... then I realized, I'm at the DMV, they want "ao", so that's what I said.
Other people have covered the linguistic aspect enough so no need for me to rehash it, but, the picture in that article is far more blue than any traffic light I've seen in Tokyo in my months there. If I had to describe them with a single word, I'd choose green without hesitation - they just have a bit of a blue tinge to them.
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.
I’ve seen very blue traffic lights in Japan both in Kyoto and Tokyo. I think the weirdest part of this story that isn’t talked about in the article is that Japan doesn’t seem to have any regulation or consistency defining which shade of blue/green the traffic light should be. Different areas will have different colors and even the same area will have different colors.
I've seen almost-blue stop lights (go lights?) in the USA, and before everything was LED the color variation between various lights was pretty wide. You could almost always figure it out in context, but absolutely speaking some red lights were almost as yellow as some other light's yellow.
The article seems to imply outside of Tokyo with "Elsewhere around the island" and perhaps "Drive around Japan long enough". It would be nice if the article was more specific here, but it's also just a Reader's Digest summary.
Color blindness compatible design is, IMO, a very neglected part of the equality debate, in many other fields. This disability has a very skewed gender ratio due to how it works genetically.
Most green lights in the US have a blue tint so that color blind people can see the blue. Most but not all, which is really frustrating as a colorblind person. More than once I've been sitting at a light until my wife told me it was green as there is one light near me without that blue tint. (we are making a left turn so light has both the round red stop light and the green left turn arrow on at the same time)
There is no clicking/hum that distinguishes those 2 states? If that's the case, you should probably check with council to have those nearby lights changed into disability-friendly setup. You may be surprised how effective it may be, maybe council has some part of the budget allocated to this so they will give it higher priority (or not, but at least try, you can help other people too)
I'm pretty sure the international agreement on road signaling completely forbids any stop and go light from being on the same place, so that you can distinguish them without depending on any color.
But well, the US never follows any agreement it signs, so yeah, that happens.
I learned this lesson in my first ever public lecture. Approximately 10% of my audience had some form of colour blindness, rendering the majority of my figures incapable of communicating their intent.
Since then I have rendered all figures for public consumption in black and white, and lines instead of surfaces where possible.
Depending on what exactly your figures were/are, you might benefit from the viridis colour map, available in matplotlib and R (and probably in many other places). It's colourful, so those without colour blindness get a richer display than if you used greyscale, and the colours chosen aren't too affected by most common forms of colour blindness. But for those that really can't see the colours, even if you literally just convert to monochrome, it still works. It also looks nice :-)
I have the relatively typical male, minor colorblindness. Using color as an signal is fine, but just make sure there's something else that's independently conveying the info.
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 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.
Funny thing, I'm NOT colorblind and apparently I only rely on the color. I've been driving for over 10 years now, mostly in the capital that has traffic lights everywhere, and sitting at my desk now not looking at a traffic light, I wouldn't want to bet money on the order.
Yes. They can still drive fine, but don't get the benefits of color coding, like being able to infer whether red or green is lit from the light reflected off of other objects. That becomes somewhat important in low visibility situations where the position is hard to determine.
With the switch from incandescent bulbs to LED traffic lights it would be very easy to change the shape of the lights: e.g. octagonal for stop, triangular for caution, and circular for go. Keep the colors, but add shape as well. Seems like an obvious and useful change to me.
Horizontal lights are not consistent across countries. The linked article has an image of a Japanese horizontal traffic light with red on the right, whereas an American traffic light would have red on the left.
Almost fifty years ago, I worked with a guy who was color-blind. This was in Colorado, where at the time some of the little towns in the mountains still had traffic lights arranged horizontally rather than vertically. He must have known the order at one time--I think I learned it for my license test--but of course with little chance for reinforcement tended to forget. I suppose that such lights are all gone now.
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.
Red cabbage or Blue Cabagge, in northern Germany is also called red cabbage (Rotkohl), same color for some regions of Austria and Switzerland (Rotkraut).
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.
Red cabbage is a bit of a weird example because its colour depends first on the acidity/basicity of the soil it was grown in, and then when you're using it on the acidity of other ingredients.
For example, if you cook it with apple (which is acidic), it will turn redder.
I don't think this distinction stems from the same source. Blue/green distinction is a clear step in linguistic development that happened in different stages for different civilisations, but they're more of a result of linguistic developments, local available colours, and manufacturing capability than a reference to plants.
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.
>The reason "lila" wasn't used to describe the cabbage is that the German language lacked a word for it.
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.
If you read any Chinese/Japanese literature, for example Buddhist or zen texts, it is very common to encounter very weird uses of the words blue or green-- because they mean things that somebody used to these distinct categories will classify nature according to these boxes. Trees are green, bodies of water blue -- even if that is more complex than that, some pines can be very blue, rivers or lakes can be much greener than blue, etc.
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?
I'm not sure I'll answer properly but I'm thinking of how information retrieval works in the brain and how similar it is to word vectors and heatmaps.
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.
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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...
https://www.philomag.com/articles/le-reve-de-descartes
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25447/25447-h/25447-h.htm
> 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.
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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 :)
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.
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> 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 (:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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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.