Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

rd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 268 posts

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#101

Post by HNDen21 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #98
troad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In English, things that are orange are often called red. Particularly, but not limited to, hair.

Wait till you find out what they call a blonde person in Croatia :-)

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#102

Post by saiya-jin »

bluGill wrote: post #85
acadapter wrote: post #4

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)

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#103

Post by [deleted] »

vinnyvichy wrote: post #73
yznlp wrote: post #29

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…

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%...

[deleted]

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#104

Post by crazygringo »

mcpackieh wrote: post #98
troad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In English, things that are orange are often called red. Particularly, but not limited to, hair.

And orange juice is actually yellow.

Which really blows some people's minds. "Well it's a little bit orange." No it's not, not your regular American bottled or fresh OJ. Straight-up yellow.

(Not denying there are varieties that produce more orange-color juice, like tangerines. But that's not what's on 99% of Americans' breakfast tables.)

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#105

Post by kouru225 »

cthalupa wrote: post #57

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. Some example photos from google image that look closest to what I've seen: https://www.pond…

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.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#106

Post by skhr0680 »

lewispollard wrote: post #84
troad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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).

Can you tell me the location of an actual blue traffic light in Japan?

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#107

Post by schattschneider »

2143 wrote: post #86

Just a data point that I want to put out there. 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…

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.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#108

Post by fenomas »

hnfong wrote: post #79
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not doubting that multiple languages have that aspect to it, but as far as I know that does not result in blue traffic lights. I have not heard of an instance of a blue traffic light in China to go with your Chinese example.

This discussion is weird, because the Kanji 青 in Japanese was borrowed from classical Chinese (presumably during the Tang dynasty around the 7th to 9th century). So using Chinese as an example of "another language" having green-blue confusion isn't very meaningful since modern Chinese aka Mandarin also inherits pretty much the same 青 albeit popular usage differs somewhat. Yet the fact that there's no blue traffic lig…

The word "ao" in Old Japanese already had the blue/green confusion before the character 青 was borrowed to write it, so if classical Chinese did as well I guess that would be two such languages.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#109

Post by doubled112 »

vages wrote: post #95
2143 wrote: post #86

Just a data point that I want to put out there. 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…

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!
Why did you ask me then?

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#110

Post by doubled112 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #98
troad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In English, things that are orange are often called red. Particularly, but not limited to, hair.

I recently watched a YouTube video about how "brown" is only a colour because we call it one, but it is really "dark orange" with context.
Post reply on HN