The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
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The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
1–10 of 72 posts
Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
#2/me lives in the Tokyo area, ethnically Japanese but grew up in the USA.
I still call these "grue" lights "midori" (green), confusing people around me.
Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
#3The same character is used in Chinese where it also refers to bluish-green, tending closer to green than blue:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92
There is also a character for a much deeper blue:
Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
#4If you're driving in Japan, you're likely to be eaten by a grue light. That said, we actually mix some blue into modern green lights, so that colorblind people can distinguish the two colors.
In official CalTrans terminology, the yellow lights are called "amber lights" -- so we have our own weirdness in the U.S.
Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
#5The same character is used in Chinese where it also refers to bluish-green, tending closer to green than blue: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92 There is also a character for a much deeper blue: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%97%8D
True, see the Pokémon case with the original Green edition and then the Blue one.
Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
#6I read somewhere that the original green light was blue but green was easier to see at dawn or at dusk or at you or something so they switched
Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
#7In short: Historically, blue and green were the same word. Green is now a separate word, but some green things are called "blue" including green traffic lights. Other "blue" things include apples and vegetables.
Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
#8The same character is used in Chinese where it also refers to bluish-green, tending closer to green than blue: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92 There is also a character for a much deeper blue: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%97%8D
The article doesn't really make this clear, but in modern Japanese 青 as a color just means blue, unambiguously. There are a lot of set phrases where it refers to green, but these have really only survived in cases where the color of the thing is obvious from context. When Japanese 青 is used to specify an unknown color it's just blue.
Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
#9If you're driving in Japan, you're likely to be eaten by a grue light. That said, we actually mix some blue into modern green lights, so that colorblind people can distinguish the two colors. In official CalTrans terminology, the yellow lights are called "amber lights" -- so we have our own weirdness in the U.S.
That's because they're a mix of yellow and orange. They're called amber across Europe too, officially anyway. :)
Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?
#10English to the rescue. Japanese has the word ブルー ("buruu", blue) from English. That word only means blue, and not green. If you want to be specific that something is blue, excluding green, just use "buruu".